alt Hacker NewsI don't think tinkering is the dominant culture behind tech anymore, but it's definitely operating at a higher scale than ever before. There's more OSS projects than ever, and there are tons of niche areas with entire communities. Examples could include: LoRa radios (or LoRA adaptors!), 3d printing, FPGA hacking, new games for retro hardware...
There was a gap before (think 90s and early 2000s) where there was a niche tinkering and more mainstream user/power user/programmer crowds. All these groups have knowledge gaps between them, but the gap was surmountable.
Now, the groups have drifted apart. Even if you're a programmer, unless you care or get excited about the hardware, you don't know how things work. You follow the docs, push the code to magical gate via that magical command, and that works. It's similar even for Desktop applications.
When you care about performance, and try to understand how these things work, you need to break that thick ice to start learning things, and things are much more complicated now, so people just tend to run away and pretend that it's not there.
Also, since the "network is reliable, computing cheap" gospel took hold, 90% of the programmers don't care about how much performance / energy they waste.