This varies wildly person to person but for me, it's not only about the means. It's a combination of means and end. If I want the computer to do something, and the only way to get it to do so is read a book and tinker, the reading and tinkering are very fun. If I could just ask the computer in plain English (which I can now), I would. Of course it's way less of a fun journey then. But just reading and tinkering with no extrinsic element is not a fun journey.

That's not enough as the abstraction of hardware and software has increased exponentially. Not only that expectations are more. Just building for a definitive set of single configuration is not enough. Any software needs to run on Amd64, RiscV, Arm64, has to be containerised, and run on OsX, Windows, Linux.. Nowadays you would need more and more knowledge/experience to be able to function without external help.