That said, the other reason you could still jump right in, is that these systems were accessible. Small enough to be understandable by a child's brain, a couple of text files you edited by hand, tinkering among a small number of parameters each of which you could test within a few minutes at most, so that worst case you spent a day dinking around with your setup. And without the distractions of the internet or thousands of free ad-supported dopamine pumps to displace your main purpose of getting this game to work.
Contrast this with today: you buy a game on Steam for $30, it doesn't work. What do you do? You have to search the internet or go to the forums, and try any number of random things that are in no way contained or enumerable and the knowledge isn't transferable. Our systems are 100x bigger than any single person can conceivably know.
The other part of me is fully aware that I have forgotten just about everything, even the filename of config.sys was only resurfaced by other posts here.