but Jesus the micromanaging sucked ass.

I think that that started pretty early-on. I remember reading that Blizzard intentionally put limits on the number of concurrently-selected units as a design decision in Starcraft to create more load for a player in making use of larger unit groups.

But yeah, I'm not a huge fan of micromanagement in video games. Even more obnoxious, IMHO, is micromanagement in grand strategy games, where the amount of stuff you need to deal with can become enormous. Just kills my ability to focus on executing a strategy with one particular unit if you're not going to see it for ages because you're off having to do a million things with other units.

why am I also telling each individual idiot to cut down trees to have wood available? shouldn’t you have figured this out by now?

Later iterations of the RTS genre resolved that to some degree or another. Or just got rid of it entirely. Total Annihilation just had you building resource collectors on appropriate squares and then you were off to the races.

it all went to hell when we started seeing Koreans play and realized we were all terrible at these games

A lot of that was overblown anyway. When you actually start looking at the international competitive scene, Americans and other Euro-types did just fine. It was seeing any combination of non-Latin alphabetic characters that drove people insane, even if the competition wasn't particularly fierce.

But Americans being racist is nothing new. Anybody playing CoD could tell you about it.