Absolutely not. All these things people are talking about in this thread are still out there, you just have to keep looking. Posts show up on HN occasionally that hint at it, but one of my favorite places to go browse when I need a hit of that passion project ecosystem is hackaday.com.
There are so many people out there doing cool stuff just to do it, especially given the fact that everything is literally orders of magnitude more accessible than it was even 10 years ago when you consider resources like YouTube, and the race to the bottom on cost of things like Arduinos, 3D printing, etc.
If this does circle back to finding a job, then that's a matter of finding the right fits. I got my first job out of college writing iOS apps for motorcoach bus schedules by showing the company a game I released on the app store, and my most recent position for a Senior iOS dev (which has translated to a firmware position), I spent most of my interview talking about my homebrew synth project: https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI
There are people out there who will be interested, and they also happen to be people who hire people! I show my coworkers my side projects all the time, sometimes they're somewhat relevant to what we do, sometimes they don't relate at all.
My guess is that this is because of different motivations people had to learn computer programming. Did you learn programming because making simple programs in Basic was irresistibly fascinating? Or did you learn programming because people told you that this was how you could make a lot of money? Of course the former type of software developer is more likely to play with "useless" (i.e. not immediately profitable) stuff than the latter.
When I was a kid, personal computers existed, but they were mere toys. It was not obvious that something like today's IT industry will exist one day. Therefore, only nerds played with personal computers. And the first IT companies were full of nerds, because those were the only people who knew how to write code.
When it became obvious that IT jobs are well paid and the demand for programmers is large, people motivated mostly by money started studying computer science, too. These days they probably are a majority at most workplaces.
Nerds had their moment in the spotlight, now they are being displaced by normies. Being fascinated by tech for tech's sake is uncool again. It is cool to be fascinated by tech for money's sake, though.
By firing James Damore, even Google made it official that people on the autistic spectrum are no longer welcome.
Dammit. So this is not something I merely suspected but is really true. I grew up around the year 2000 and programming was all I could think about, I read about people/meetups you describe and was eager to be a part of them.
By the time I grew up, attended university and started a job, things seemed very different. The stuff that got me excited about programming are now considered "boring" or "legacy".
Makes you wonder if you should give up on what you like doing and do what is considered amazing now (AI etc) even though you don't find it fun :/