> You had to code against the metal, so to speak
These days, you can actually code the metal itself (so to speak) with easily and cheaply available FPGAs! That to me is even more exciting, certainly a lot of fun, and at least I've been doing a lot of trying and failing with it.
You can do it as a hobby, yes. But if it is your job, you'll still have to navigate your way through impenetrable piles of convoluted needless layers.
Not to mention the awful closed-source toolchains.
I think I view programming as mental abstractions in action, or to put as Steve Jobs did bicycles for the mind.
The late 80's, early 90's were much more fun programming than today. There wasn't 20 layers of abstraction between the developer and the machine. You had to code against the metal, so to speak.