>Yet, somewhere the spirit persists. Hidden away in encrypted Matrix rooms, deep inside dead drop Git repositories and onion forums, the real work continues. The underground never died — it just moved to quieter places.

You wish. True hackers wrote HAKMEM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM, wrote ZMachine interpreters in PostScript, wrote compilers for the Subleq machine with memory indirection and ran GNU/Linux on it. You pale against Lisp hackers who almost ate Discrete Math books for breakfast.

The PC "hacking" was nothing more than a bunch of kids playing with really underopowered toys.

There's more hacking spirit in Fabrice Bellard and Common Lisp/Scheme books than the whole PC hacking/cracking and phreakign scene.

This is a genuine hacking act:

https://bellard.org/dvbt/

This too:

http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/

The same with Emacs hackers repurposing the editor for anything. IRC, Email, ZMachine interpreter, music and video player interfaces, web browsers, equation solvers, controlling aiports in Germany as an ATC messaging router (and I am NOT kidding about the last one)...

This might be the craziest achievement from a GNU product ever. Repurpossing a text editor to manage a civil infraestructure:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsStories