I think an underappreciated value of growing up in that era, was that the entire machine, top to bottom, was simple enough that a single person could understand it. Without even making it their life's work. There's simply nothing today like that.
So the older machines are an important conceptual building block. And they're not academic exercises taught in theoretical simulation but never experienced, they're real physical machines that did useful things for people who are still around and can walk you through doing the same things on the very same machines.
The other magical thing about home computers of that era, was that they were ROM-based, with very explicit operations to commit data to nonvolatile storage. You couldn't accidentally delete a system file and render the machine unbootable, and that encouraged experimentation in a way that subsequent PCs harshly punished.
Also, while 8-bit home computers weren't really toys, they were _almost_ toys, in that very few folks were running a business on their C64. (And again, even if they did, all they had to do was lock the business disks in a cabinet at the end of the day.) So the consequences of even a major screwup were limited, again in a way that the next generation of PCs dramatiaclly reversed. I knew kids "grounded for life" (actually a few months) in the 90s because they hosed up the family PC that mom or dad was doing the taxes on or whatever. That simply wasn't a thing in the 80s.
All of learning is making mistakes. One hundred percent. And modern machines don't allow it in the same way. We were privileged to learn in a real-but-nearly-consequence-free environment, which today's kids will simply never experience.