It also does provide a societal benefit of having backup knowledge that might work when newer technologies fail.
This caused them to be effectively banned by the 1930s, outside of marine use, in favor of continuous wave transmitters.
So that particular obsolete hobby will not have a resurgence.
I can see a similar argument with ham radio. If it "dies", that is, if there are many-fold fewer people using it, then that frees up RF spectrum. There will be pressure to reallocate those frequencies to, eg, commercial use.
When the 2090s subculture rediscovers ham radio, there won't be the spectrum for them all, and the spectrum assignments will be hard to change for what is likely a fad.
Maybe CB radio will be popular again? "Ah, breaker one-nine, this here's the rubber duck. you gotta copy on me, pig pen, c'mon?"
Talk about old hobbies. When I was about 9 I found an 8-track of his and fell in love with that song. I spent much of that summer buying stereo equipment at garage sales to get a working 8-track player setup in my bedroom just so I could listen to that song on repeat.
"There's a road-block up on the cloverleaf and them Bears was wall to wall. I said Pig Pen this hear's a Rubber Duck, we justa ain'ta gonna pay no toll. So we crash the gate doing 98 I says let them truckers role 10-4."
However, the difference between let's say blacksmithing/knitting and ham radio is that the latter is a social hobby and relies on having enough hams out there so that there's actually some people to talk to on the air, and the problem they're facing right now is that the amount of those people seems to be on the decline.
Increasingly radio is how we are communicating, but it may not be obvious as the technology is hidden deep down.
As in all times, there will be curious individuals that wish to know how it all connects or wish to bend technology to their will.
Internet, as technology, is in no way in opposition to this fact. I would say that they are orthogonal.
Nowadays that is no longer true. Except in very specialized applications, analog radio is not typically used for communication, and digital isn't using manually-operated radios either, it's stacks of dozens of layers that eventually end up transferring IP packets or similar.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but since ham radio no longer represents how the majority of people communicate today, maybe we shouldn't be holding onto the past and instead focus on how people communicate now? Maybe IP networks should be the future "ham radio", and we should have clubs around these things instead (and existing ham clubs should embrace them, instead of siloed things like digital modes over radio which are innovative but near-useless in real-world usage)?
Even in emergency situations (which is one of the arguments for ham radio), a satellite phone/modem will get you online pretty much anywhere in the world and the only barrier is the equipment, which doesn't seem too different from a ham radio where a good set costs decent money and can't easily be built from scratch and especially not in an emergency situation.
Imagine if ham radio involved into what I described above in which case being a ham could actually give you immediate, real-world benefits to you and your community in working around bad/nonexistent ISPs by building your own infrastructure? This would bring a lot more people into the hobby because those skills allow them to solve actual problems they/their community is facing.