You are forgetting the world we live in now where, as time passes, fewer and fewer people will know how to do anything on their own and more and more will only accomplish things by using AI.
I didn't grow by editing DOS config files, but I began with it in Elementary and I've got Debian Woody (later Sarge) in my late HS teen years. OFC I played with game emulators, settings, optimizations, a lot, and under GNU/Linux I even tweaked some BTTV drivers for some El Cheapo TV Tuner. The amount of thinkering these people had omitted because of smartphones and such it's huge.
On the other hand, I've met people in the Godot game engine community that have built entire games on Android devices using Godot (yes, actually used an Android phone and the Godot game engine to build a game; not simply exported an Android game from a PC), so that only proves to me that if someone's got that "hacker spirit", they'll find a way to indulge it, even if the only thing they've got to work with is a smart-phone (and a spare keyboard / mouse layin' around). Problem is that mentality isn't encouraged quite the way it used to be back in the early days of the tech industry. The advertising and entertainment industries have "optimized" the Internet for "engagement", but most definitely not for the betterment of humanity. You gotta have that drive to build and create things or you'll get sucked down the various total waste of life rabbit-holes provided by the brain-sucky industries.
If not, you're already much farther down this dependency funnel that you believe.
The idea is not to be hypergeneralist. What I observe - subjectively - is that we are losing whole generations of what used to be the 'nerdy IT/ham-radio/electronics-folks'. Sure, there is a small remnants with the makerscene, but that's mostly older people (beginning in their late teens).d
We all use elevators but know basically nothing about them -- hence the countless nonsense Hollywood scenes with a cut elevator cable (spoiler: you'd be fine). By contrast when they were first being introduced, every single person that rode on an elevator was probably quit well aware of the tension brake systems and other redundancies - because otherwise, stepping foot in one would feel insane. But when you grow up with them and take everything for granted, hey who cares - it works, yeah?
At Half Price Books I picked up a book on assembler and started writing my first code using debug.com simply because of boredom. In an era where I could have instead been watching endless entertaining videos on any subject imaginable, or playing literally free video games optimized for thousands of hours of entertainment? I'd certainly have never been bored, and I'm not sure I'd have ever even gotten into computers (or anything for that matter). Indeed a disproportionately large number of zoomers seem to have no skills whatsoever, and that's going to be a major issue for humanity moving forward.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome"