> But that's still 30 years ago so Lego has been fancy pieces and custom kits for a couple generations of kids now.

You can get a 790 piece big box of Lego brand plastic building blocks on Amazon for $35. These types of collections tend to end up in yard sells, or passed around extended families because they last longer than a single childhood. The none-fancy Lego branded blocks still exist, and are still a common part of childhood in America. Lego just doesn't have to market them as hard, and the sale volume is naturally lower.

Sure, and my young relatives do things basically the same as I did: have a stable of "common" bricks + a bunch of specialty models.

Then when you get bored with the specialty model as-it-is, the pieces go in the bins and you remix them with everything else :)

They push the sets pretty hard. I know someone who ran a toy shop, and Lego wouldn’t sell them plain brick packets unless they bought a certain number of expensive sets.

I think in 00s they didn’t abuse special pieces so much as they do now. Their sets looked more like “see what can be done with our pieces” rather than ”you have to buy this exact set because only it contains the pieces you need to build it”.

There are very sets that contains exclusives, and then usually minifigs, and you can also pick and buy individual pieces. But they are certainly leaning far more into the special pieces. That said, there even when I was buying LEGO sets for myself or begging for them for christmas and birthdays in the early 1980's, it was still on the basis on wanting a specific set because of how they made it look assembled, not for "just" the collection of bricks.