The thing that really drove the PC era was that the commodity desktop spec was rapidly gaining capability, compilers for them were getting good enough to depend on high-level languages, and the most affordable way to meet the market where it was, was not to build custom(as had been the case in the 80's when looking at stuff like video editing systems, CGI, digital audio, etc.) but to use Microsoft as a go-between. All the heralded architectures of the 80's were doing things more custom, but it amounted to a few years of advantage before that convergence machinery came along and stripped away both customers and developers.

Apple did survive in that era, though not unassisted, and the differentiation they landed on(particularly after Jobs came back) was to market a premium experience as an entry point. I think that is probably going to be the exit from today's slop.

In this era, spec is not a barrier - and you can make <$100 integrated boards that are competent small computers, albeit light on I/O - and that means that there's a lot more leeway to return to the kinds of specialty, task-specific boxes that the PC had converged. There's demand for them, at least at a hobbyist level.

For example, instead of an ST and outboard synths for music, you could now get an open-source device like the Shorepine Tulip - an ESP32 touchscreen board set up with Micropython and some polished DSP code for synths and effects. It's not powerful enough to compete with a DAW for recording, but as an instrument for live use, it smashes the PC and its nefarious complexities.