And I admit having a sense that I am not as knowledgeable as I could be about using these insanely powerful devices to their fullest potential. The demoscene can make amazing things happen with teensy amounts of code. Amazing!
So I started watching the Ben Eater making your own breadboard computer series, and am now following hia 6502 series so I can eventually convert my model M to a self-container battery powered DIY Alphasmart word-processor-to-SD-card contraption, because why not?
So I too agree that the tiktokers are the kids these days for now, but I more heartily agree that some of them will discover something new and amazing on that there YouTube. Maybe they'll learn something we've forgotten and leave all of us in their dust with what they do with it!
Then again, bit earlier you had included BASIC on every microcomputer, and hardware documented way better than random PCs glued together with duck tape.
The modern "digital native" that I categorize is the legions of young people getting started in programming the vast number of rich environments that exist today.
Yes I remember the times upgrading my 486DX-33 to 8Mb of RAM, installing slackware from floppies, figuring out whatever dark magic was needed to run Duke Nukem 3D over IPX networks simulated over dialup, and heady and critically important discussions about the role of Amigas, coveting the barmaid in LoRD on the high school BBS, running unauthorized star wars MUDs on the high school computer network and getting dragged in front of school boards because you ran "nethack" once (in fairness it was likely also the pornography being accessed and distributed leveraging the school T1 lines as well but in my defence I was 14).
It was a time and a place, and there's certainly value in reminiscing. But these new kids will create their own time and place, and demanding that they somehow pay homage to my experience as being "more authentic" seems a bit pleading.
And to be honest we downplay the limitations of our times. Free and accessible development environments? Not on the standard desktop PC operating system (until DJGPP came along anyway, and even that had severe limitations for a while for building native windows apps). If you were a super nerd who went out of your way and downloaded an obscure little free unix system developed by some finnish guy named after a peanuts character, you got a compiler. And then if you scrounged around random docfiles spread out across dozens and dozens of random howtos, you could sort of learn how to program C, or python or perl.
I look at today's technical environment, available to the entry level student in some technical field, and the available breadth and depth of tooling, the amount of documentation and tutorials, all available for free, and it's amazing. If you're someone looking to build something interesting, there are a 100 different more opportunities to do that today using accessible tooling than there ever was when I was a kid.