From my POV (maybe I'm just looking in a different direction?) I see way more people programming out of intellectual curiosity and fun than ever before. As just one example the 2018 Global Game Jam had 8,608 game created in a weekend. The Unity community is HUGE. The Processing community, the Open Frameworks community, the Three.js community. Not seeing a lack of people doing programming for curiosity and fun.
I was more talking about the workplace. Now we have a lot of "professionalism" and "management" with a lot of restrictions. Back then you didn't have that in a lot of companies. As a dev in a company you had much more freedom. I can understand the need for professionalism but it definitely takes the fun and adventure out of things.
