If real income had kept up with productivity gains, we might still live in a world where ordinary people could afford to invent and patent expensive new forms of recreation.
It still happens, but only the extremely wealthy can participate in their devopment. Water-jet hoverboards, VR, green homesteading...
I personally have prototyped an idea for a small, cheap, flexible consumer product that I would love to build and sell, but I don't have 7 figures to burn if it doesn't work out - I can't even afford a house on a low 6-figure salary, nevermind saving enough to start a business! So it will remain a pipe dream until some large organization with loads of capital picks the low-hanging fruit.
Kickstarter is like the fastest route to getting undercut by an imitation for something like that.
Honestly, I think something like as-seen-on-TV would work better for a novel widget idea. You could sell an initial run all at once, and fund future development if it turned out to be popular: I guess the modern equivalent would be Instagram or YouTube ads. But I don't have enough capital to build up enough stock for a launch, when the runway for clones is about 4 months from the point where a mainland factory catches wind of your idea.
The incentive to actually implement and sell an idea once you see that it can be done cheaply and easily doesn't exist in our current economy, unless you already have so much capital that you don't need to work. It's a frustrating catch-22.
I know I'd rather have weird bowling than any of those, but we don't have it in my region.
Many of the most capable people are identified before they're adults and then relocated to certain specific institutions, locations, and careers. The result is that the places and subcultures they leave behind fail to thrive in a thousand small ways, the cumulative effects of which are obvious.
In 1900, lots of the people who today are 10x programmers in SF were farmers and small business owners in small towns or rural areas. When you look back at some of the things they figured out and built, you see a level of talent that most of their modern successors lack.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/how-san-francisco-s-leng...
https://sfist.com/2021/06/25/disgraced-ex-dbi-inspector-appr...
https://sf.eater.com/2017/6/27/15733554/cost-open-restaurant...
Hell, the examples provided are way less crazy than graft scandals and mafia wars from the time period you are looking at with rose tinted glasses [0]
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_graft_trials
[1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-corruption-...
It seems like you are supporting my point.