There’s loads of hacker spirit still alive in the homelab and home automation space just to give one example.

Having lots of fun tinkering with Proxmox, Wled, Shelly devices to manipulate electric rollers, and more. Couldn’t quite get Valetudo running on my robot vacuum (my model isn’t the easiest to hack) but the concept is so cool. Triggering automations With dirt cheap NFC tags or a cheap wireless numpad is so satisfying.

Building an *arr stack is another area where there’s tons of amazing creativity online and the hacker spirit still lives on.

You don't even have to look per se. The YouTube aglo provides me a lot of interesting content that isn't especially high quality or production value. I do take an effort to ignore click bait as much as possible and click "don't recommend channel" for things like MKBHD and LTT, because those crowd out original content if you let them.

Plenty of hackers with substantial social media presences but they live in pockets that don't cross over into mainline social media too much.

Social media popularity is pretty much an anti-signal nowadays. The more popular the closer to the average.