Old school nerd culture wasn't nearly as bad, or the version I was a part of. I mean, this whole "rage against emulation" shit is fresh off the 2010s presses. Nintendo fans became rabid when it became a personality type that soys could grab onto, a new form of hipster. Console wars were always the same, but they used to die out at a certain age. This whole new wave of completely serious console warring isn't the same.
Even things like D&D used to be 90% people owning one book and going to the library to print off a PDF into a giant tome of D&D books they got off the internet. Modern groups though, it's a bunch of fat women and bearded soy craft beer lovers showing off their neatly shelved collections bought from Barnes and Noble during a buy one get one half off sale.
When nerd chic went mainstream in 2007 or so, it just slowly died and became a consumerist culture, showcasing how much you can buy to have nerd cred, and when people don't actually buy into that world with their hard earned money, that crowd shrieks because they feel it's invalidating "their" hobby. They will change to another hobby this decade, as they have every other decade, but the consumerist side is here to stay.
Also, with how exposed everything is, there are far too many people that are normalfags afraid of piracy, which is a huge reason the "just pirate it lol" mentality has been on such a huge decline. People think piracy is a hugely difficult task when it's literally gotten easier every single year.
I think one of the most interesting and effective ways of conveying what I mean is what we used to do with game boxes before the disc era. So few people kept those boxes, most people dumped them day one. It was about the game, not the shelves.
I could really go on about this for far too long, but tl;dr, old school crowd was less so, modern crowd is all consumerism.
