Just saw this recent (from this or last month) Richard Garriott interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m60SbCPdfQI

Guy made $150,000 from the precursor game to Ultima… at 19 years old, in 1980.

The 1980s were full of kids becoming thousandaires by making games from their bedrooms after school, in just a few weeks or months at most..

Can we bring that back somehow?

Those early devs had almost no "prior art" to draw from, just the imagination in their heads.

And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now.