Gaming moved for a lot of us from 'now I have 5 hours or whole weekend to gaming if I want to' to mere blips here and there, which need to be as frictionless as poasible.
Which is great - it means we are doing something actually meaningful and more worthy in our lives. But it also means I will never have enough time for such fiddling. I am fine with it, as much as I can be, but lets be honest to ourselves here.
Where are the hordes of kids like us back then who were content with the afternoons, evenings and wee early morning hours of endless fiddling? What I realize now is those years spent fiddling sharpened our debugging senses in both ineffable and tractable ways.
A larger proportion of the juniors I see coming through the corporate halls these days than I remember from even 10 years ago do not have that knack for fiddling, nor history when it comes up. And it shows in their debugging temperament. LLM's are making this worse.
For all the issues people claim to have with iOS or Android, they really "just work" compared to the shit we had to deal with back in the day. And I don't even mean bugs, but UX just wasn't as sleek.
I can find a pdf of the TTRPG I'm playing that's hidden deep in an iCloud drive by simply opening spotlight an typing the approximate name. And the same works on my iPhone. Apps that create documents for me hide their file structure, because it's all abstracted away from me. It works, and I don't have to think about it as much.
You still have kids that start fiddling with tech, but only out of clear interest. Not as a necessity.
So the bar to clear to get to gaming is much lower now, and it makes sense fewer kids get to the point where they must tinker to get at those games.