I think the drop in tinkering is due to the high skill/cost barrier to entry particularly SMT, and lab equipment. If you want to do anything interesting beyond a breadboard and arduino/rpi you are going to need to invest in a custom pcb and lab equipment. With SMT, I got into EE/HW by taking things apart and studying them, back then (late 90's) most consumer stuff still had a good mix of thru-hole and SMT so tinkering was easy. Now almost nothing is thru-hole so if you want to fix or modify anything you are going to need more than a cheap harbor freight soldering iron.
Do you have a recommended hot air station for tinkerer use? I am trying to move up from breadboarding into something more field-deployable proof of concept.
Look up '959D' as a model. They're serviceable hot air stations made by a bunch of different white label vendors that are usually $40-60 on the likes of Amazon, cheaper elsewhere.
You can work with SMT at home no problem. A decent hot air station like Quick 861dw will cost you just about $300 and you don’t need much more to tinker.
