Too many hobbies online have been flooded with bullshit. I don't mean just trannies and bots, those only made things worse. But even before that, there were already lots of people using lawyer terms like "IP", or business terms like "franchise", when talking about games. And I don't mean they use it in very specific/narrow topics about copyright or whatever, they just use those terms casually all the time. It's a real downer, man.
Long ago when I was a kid, we never used those terms. We didn't even think in those terms, because we were 100% busy just playing the games and having fun. I copied so many games on floppy disks back in the day, without a single thought beyond "Oh yeah, more games!" And I never knew what someone was going to give me next, it was always a surprise. Most of these games I'd never even heard of, because my only news was some computer magazines, and I rarely bought those. And I played them all, no matter how good or bad they were. The only ones I ever deleted are those that crashed, either because of buggy code or a bad copy. Every game was precious to me, because unlike today there was no way to download entire sets of disk images. Whatever little I managed to get on the local sneakernet, that's all I had.
So it was more about the games (or other hobby) themselves, less about other bullshit, including their monetisation and endless youtube "personalities", etc.