Comment by ChuckMcM

I agree with this, I think the fraction of people who are looking at computers in this deep way is similar to what it has always been, but it is still a small fraction. And as such its activities are swamped in the noise of other things with the same name.

Perhaps part of the difference is that before (when RAM/CPU was expensive/slow) you were forced to do this to make something impressive and now we have an excess of compute and RAM. So to rekindle that challenge we set an artificial limit.