Comment by tacostakohashi

It seems to be strongly correlated with (and perhaps caused by) the iphone / smartphone / tablet boom of the 2010s. That's when lots of mass market things slowly shifted from being on "computers" or "the internet" into being apps, which are inherently geared towards consumption and not creation, and encourage storing all the data in "the cloud" instead of on the device.

That left "desktop" computing as no longer where the action was, but just a legacy platform for people doing their day jobs, and most things being dumbed down into single-purpose apps that cannot be modified, customized, combined, or anything fun/interesting/not intended by the vendor.