That would be a golden economic age. We're talking about the craft of programming. They're different things.
There were never as many tools, programming languages, IDEs, framework, services and tools available for programming. And with the advancement in technology, even a pretty old laptop is still powerful enough to run it all. You now even gave LLMs that are interesting (even if very flawed) code assistants.
If anything, the golden age of programming is a tomorrow that is always postponed another day.
Why would anyone interested in programming use anything else?
I am forced to use a Mac at work, but I digress.
I totally agree, but most people I know (myself included) initially got started on different systems (Windows in my case). If I'd had to learn Linux at the same time, it may have been too steep a learning curve