I've shown many of the more recent demos, built for modern systems with GPUs, to lots of regular people. Many of the best are still viewed as impossibly cool mu

I've shown many of the more recent demos, built for modern systems with GPUs, to lots of regular people. Many of the best are still viewed as impossibly cool music videos even if the technical magic is lost on "normies". There's still plenty of people who ask me "are there any new demos out there you can send me on youtube?" Some of the artwork, music, and overall representation is first-class at levels top commercial studios develop for advertisements or movie intros etc. But it's all done by hobbyists and I think lots of people can appreciate the pure art aspect of it. The rest of the scene is very much appreciation for doing things within various technical constraints, and any appreciation of that requires more technical understanding. Even these days, many younger software engineers have trouble understanding what it takes to make and compete one of these constrained demos because the constraints themselves are virtually impossible to fathom for people who grew up smoking GB of RAM with poorly written Python code. The idea of writing a 4kb demo for an ancient 8-bit computer that was dead in the market more than a decade before they were even born doesn't compute until you really start walking them through the fundamental CS concepts implied.