How a lot of the coding part was so hardcore is probably explained by not having things like Unity or Unreal back then, so everything had to be done from scratch
I'm not interested in a debate about what society is better, but it's an interesting distinction.
The sceners, who were mostly teenagers, most certainly did not have any ambitions working in software, at that time. At least, very few, and it would never have been the main drive. You have to understand that the whole scene was rooted in breaking copy protection. The pirate groups started making "cracktros" to include in the release of the pirated software, a visual 'demo' saying, "we cracked this software; this is who we are." The demoscene, eventually, highly intertwined with the BBS scene. Crackers, hackers, phreakers, and gfx coders were all ingredients in the same stew. It was a culture of show-offs, attempting to outdo each other. Fun and careless. There were anarchists and anti-government tendencies — a lot of illegalities and arrests.
I can assure you that many of us dreamt of working with computers in some way and the fact is that many of us do, today - including a lot of those who were previously involved in illicit activites.
That doesn't mean it was a driving force behind the scene, but of course people had a yearning to employ their skills by working with something they percieved as fun and exciting.
(edit: spelling)
As previously discussed in this thread, many sceners ended up in game dev, others became artists (music), that should tell you something about what their motivation was, and what they considered fun. The drudgery of working in a Fortune 500 doing enterprise programming was not it.
Those who didn't concede to a job attempted to start their own thing.
The demoscene was largely teenagers. Teenagers who were afforded the chance to have a personal computer through pervasive decent living standards, with enough free time to experiment on things for the sake of experimentation and learning. They (we) were making art and impressing each other, not looking to cash in to make mad loot.
The only way I see taxes as having contributed to the development of the demo scene and the subsequent high-level tech companies founded or staffed by demoscene veterans is that a high-enough level of taxation permitted these kids fo "just play around" and make art for art's sake.