Everyone's different. Some people genuinely thrive under the conditions you're describing, others don't like it but are able to put up with it no problem, and others can't stand it but are forced to.

The perspective I've found most useful is this. There is a constellation of correlated "autistic traits", which everyone has to a degree, but which like most traits become disabling if turned up too much. "Autism" is a term describing that state. So, it is much less a particular switch that can be turned on or off, not even a slider between "not autistic" and "very autistic", but more a blurry region at the outskirts of the multidimensional bell curve of the human experience.

People on the furthermost reaches of this space are seriously, unambiguously disabled, by any definition. They're what people traditionally imagine as "autistic". But the movement in psychiatry has been to loosen diagnostic criteria to better capture the grey areas. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is a social question, not a scientific one, in my opinion. Most of us want to live in a society that supports disabled people, but how many resources to allocate to that is a difficult question where our human instincts seem to clash with the reality of living in a modern society.

On your last paragraph: I think this is a serious problem with the discourse around neuroatypicality today. My opinion is that the important thing is that we become more accepting and aware of the diversity of the human experience, and that this is a necessary social force to balance the constant regression to the mean imposed by modernity. If that's the case, then drawing a border around any category of person, staking a territorial claim to a pattern of difficulty the group experiences, and refusing to accept that the pattern exists beyond it: it's just unfair, it's giving into defensiveness.

> They're what people traditionally imagine as "autistic". But the movement in psychiatry has been to loosen diagnostic criteria to better capture the grey areas.

There has also been a change that reclassified what we would previously have termed Asperger’s Syndrome as Autism. To be clear, AS was always considered to be a form of or closely related to Autism, but that change in language does mean we’ve had a big shift in what is Autism medically and what the public pictures when they think Autism