If we only allow "tinkering" to mean fixing things that should work, sure: Stuff works better today. But I include hardware tuning and software modding in that

If we only allow "tinkering" to mean fixing things that should work, sure: Stuff works better today. But I include hardware tuning and software modding in that too, and both are vastly more powerful and present than they were in the 90s. My experience ~30 years ago involves a 386, big-box computer, Window 3.1 pre-installed. My options for tinkering (outside the battle for HIMEM) were pressing a turbo button and hex-editing File Manager to File Mangler. There was no hardware modding scene at that level, just a choice of massively expensive storage and RAM. I'm sure there was more that you could describe as maintenance but I don't consider myself any less of a hacker because I don't have to run "hdsit" before I shut down. Did I do more stuff? Sure. I didn't have a huge number of games so writing your own, playing with tools was pretty much your only option, and I would agree with a characterisation that people fiddle with computers less because they have less contact time with an actual desktop environment outside of the browser. We are spoilt for choice. But PC gamers still tinker. The have hardware options unimaginable in the 90s and the scale of game modding scenes for things like The Witcher 3, GTA5, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Minecraft, Souls and Rimworld eclipse those efforts in the 90s, many times over. Shader beautifiers weren't even possible. Is it niche? Probably, but PC gaming has always been niche.