I don't need to imagine. If you work that minimum wage job for ONE DAY, you'll have 100 bucks in your pocket. You know what you can do with that money? You can buy a ten year old enterprise grade server that's been decommissioned and is for sale on eBay, with free shipping. Now you go on /r/homelab and get free help to get it up and running. All the software is free.
There are always excuses, but let's not sit here and pretend like things are more difficult now than they were before. They've never been easier and we've never had as much opportunity.
When I was growing up, any capable computer, used or new, was $3k and there was no internet, no help, and no free software.
Generally, I think you're right that a lot of the information is available. I think maybe there's a misunderstanding with just how little "money availability" there is for someone in rural America working a minimum wage job, hence why my dream is to target people while they're still in school.
Imagine if every high school had the budget to run a modern, staffed programming lab, garage, chemistry lab, hell astronomy lab? If kids could get hands on, across America, at age 13? I desperately wish I had Musk levels of wealth if nothing else so I could just start plopping labs across middle America, where as a child my own craving for a hands on education was never delivered by my public schools.