They've been possible the whole time in software designed for the user, it's just that the business world will do everything in its power to undermine the user's control to protect their business model. The primary barrier is not the difficulty of writing some drivers for a piece of hardware, it's the intentional barriers that the mfg puts in your way so that that is harder to do -- lack of docs, obfuscation, various kinds of drm. A win is a win, but the same will happen in this new world. The barriers will just have to be built a bit higher until most users give up.

One of the things about the AI hype train that really got me was how many of the stories of wonderment were about the things that have always been trivial on a computer if you actually use it for computing instead of just running somebody else's proprietary magical spell. Obviously it's capable of nontrivial things, but I heard so many stories of like "I would have had to manually rename 100 files to a different naming convention, but claude wrote a 20-line python script in 30 seconds that did it write away" and you hear what the renaming was and instantly know how to do it in one trivial line of bash. In other words, stories about it doing things that computers have always been good at, that have been taken away from you by the notion that computers are for begging the avatar of a corporation to work some magic.