Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring. This was supercharged in the 70s. That’s no longer the case. People have endless, on demand entertainment inside now.
There was nothing in the house to make me want to stay in. Nothing like a console or PC, best thing were books on days when going out would be deadly (exceptionally hot or cold). I was going out by necessity, initially knowing and as I grew up hoping that some other kids will be doing the same. And from that large pool of "random" kids I'd get very close to a few, become friends and then have some more on-demand negotiated fun instead of opportunistic. This lead us on hundreds of adventures anywhere we could physically go for it.
Before we even consider how walkable or dense a city is, how safe, how permissive modern laws are of letting kids just be, etc. the questions is, how many kids or parents stop short of running into any of these problems because the kids have all they think they need inside some type of electronic device?
Years of gaming let you internalize a huge number of UX idioms that you rely on everyday, like left and right mouse clicks, hierarchical menus, hotkeys, text input, active and inactive UI elements, navigating documents larger than the viewport (drag/scroll wheel/scroll bars), and so on and so forth. Imagine how much harder it would be for your 14 year old self to install and run XAMPP or whatever if they knew none of these things. Imagine how much harder it would be for your 17 year old self to begin their programming journey if they didn't already know what a file is.
Looking back from the end of the road, those 0.1% might look tiny and insignificant. But there's a high chance you'd never go into programming at all if you didn't play video games as a child. Not because of the games themselves, but because they gave you early exposure to computers. If all you did was browse Facebook instead, the effect would be much the same.
"Acquainted with computers" is closer to endlessly strolling tiktoc now.
I used to work in a phone store where almost all customers were 50+. Explaining how to call a saved contact was a daily occurence to us, nevermind creating new contacts. While I do understand why this happens and have nothing but sympathy for these people, I wouldn't want my daughter to be like that at 18.
So I got a bit of childhood before receiving those (pretty scary stuff if I think about it - exploring holes that looked like trenches, that were dig up by workers to put water pipes in them, or exploring an old, ruined house) - living in a typical communist-era block of flats community.
But a year or so after receiving computer I started spending less and less time outside and more on computers, basically making me socially isolated except my two closest colleagues. Nowadays my two daughters are more social than I am, but I like computers too much.
The inside wasn't boring so much as parents didn't want their kids inside and requiring attention or supervision. TVs, tables and gaming consoles means they can be inside without this burden, so it became an easy default.
This was still in the era of SNES and Sega, but even those got boring after a while.