I agree with you in general, but I think it has to be said that we also live in the era of things like the source for Unreal Engine 5 being completely and wholly available, along with a zillion tutorials and extremely well documented source. This is unlike anything we had, and better in basically every single way imaginable. In the hardware world there's Pi's, dirt cheap PCBs that you can have delivered in < 24 hours, and so on endlessly. It's like instead of breaking into a trailer, we've all been granted carte blanche access to a mansion.

But maybe there was something about how counter-culture and esoteric stuff was itself attractive precisely because of that. There was also a lot more reward for a lot less work, largely because so few people were doing it. Now if somebody wants to go learn Unreal then it's just a pretty mundane and common thing, and you'll also be largely incompetent unless you're willing to dedicate years to it. By contrast when I was a kid changing the text in a shareware installer was enough to wow my friends with my leet skills, and that's something that took about 5 minutes to do, and not that much longer to learn. Oh and then creating secret directories by naming them alt+255, and so on. Dumb stuff, but it soon enough led me to much more than parlor tricks.