I feel like a lot of concepts are being conflated.

Plug and Play arrived. Windows abstracted everything. The Wild West closed. Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became appliances. The craft became invisible.

I disagree with this. The craft is still alive and well, it's just specialized. As complexities in approaches grow, it's not possible for a single person to know every register of every subunit all the way up to high level application software in any reasonable manner. You can totally write your own bootloader for your current hardware. Nothing is stopping you. Is the argument that the financial utility is lowered? Is it that he chose voluntarily to focus on application layer development?

This is like someone who built their own bicycle lamenting they can't do the same for a modern EV.