It's an interesting paradox: the more we made computing accessible, the less we got out of it.

When a PC was expected to boot to an OS and not much else, we had all the freedom - by necessity - to tinker and learn. Hardware was barely enough for most day-to-day usage, so we upgraded relatively frequently and got to know the physical innards as well.

This is all so streamlined today that even computers can be smartphones with "apps", or even just a browser that gets you to google slides and everything else (or the MS equivalents). It was probably a necessity that, as computers became infrastructure, they would become simplified, so 90% of the population can indeed file their tax return online (and the remaining 10% have their younger family members do it).

This also means that people nowadays simply don't know that they can walk into any second hand store and get a $200 PC with a warranty that'll be much more productive than any smartphone if they have the knowledge to use it properly. But was there really a loss? These are, for the most part, people that would not have been able to hop on the internet wagon if it'd relied on maintaining a linux distro at all. That's regarding adults; children now do indeed grow up with walled systems for the most part, and that might be a loss.

In the past, it was hard to start using computers, but once you did, the journey from user to expert and developer was smooth sailing.

Now it's much easier to start using a computer, but going beyond that has become so much harder.