> Non-technical people used to learn bits of HTML just to get sparkly backgrounds on their MySpace pages.

I'm going to take a slightly different interpretation of your comment because I think it's an interesting discussion: are the non-technical people of today less technical than the non-technical people of the MySpace days?

From what I have observed, I would say yes. If you took the bottom 10% of users back then, you might have a hope of teaching them HTML. Today? No chance. In particular I think "willingness to learn anything" has really waned.

There were tons of users in the 90s who didn't have a clue how to use a computer—I mean even at a very rudimentary level—and just followed memorized or written-down steps, getting lost almost immediately if anything went wrong. Luckily for them, software was way less likely to throw up "what's new" modals seemingly at random, interrupting whatever they were trying to do, back then :-/ (edit: or to "improve" [pointlessly re-arrange] their UI while the user was away from the computer, for that matter)

If there are more of them now it's probably because computer use expanded 100 fold since then, at least, and the largely self-selected 90s users of the Web, especially, tended to have greater-than-average interest in learning computer crap, so a high proportion of new users were the can't-or-don't-want-to-learn sort. In the 90s a computer still might not be the centerpiece of an office worker or middle manager's desk, and most folks used computers very little at home, if they even had one (data I'm seeing indicates % of households in the US with a computer only hit 50% in 2000).

Definitely. My thought is rather that it’s an additional point of friction that makes selling a workflow like this more difficult.