I'm not sure that's true. The games that allow or encourage tinkering have pretty decent modding communities. What were we doing 30 years ago that we aren't today? The only mainstream thing I can think of are devices like Game Genie.
Completely with you on matchmaking. The pathetic limits on these things. You've not lived until you've had a dozen friends all try to climb in/on a drop ship in Tribes 2 in a 64v64 match. That was worth carting a CRT to a lan gaming convention alone. But I don't believe players prefer this, they just don't have a choice. I much prefer the old server-list model.
>What were we doing 30 years ago that we aren't today?
Messing with computers.
PC gaming today is as simple as going out to Best Buy or Costco, buying a "gaming" desktop, come home, unbox it, plug everything in, initialize (note: not install) Windows, install Steam, and Bob's your uncle.
Most of us hailing from the 20th century learned how computers worked because we kind of had to to run the games we wanted to play. Memory address allocations, DLL hell, driver hell, registry tricks, picking out parts and putting it all together; all stuff gamers today simply don't have to deal with. Windows Update will even figure out most if not all the drivers for you.
And before anyone says it: Yes yes, I know buying a "gaming" desktop from Best Buy or Costco isn't ideal. But guess what? We are outdated oldtimers. We definitely know how to get the best stuff, but gamers simply don't need the best anymore. Computers have become household appliances, not tinkerers' toys to be handled by wizards. So what if that desktop from Best Buy craps out? They just go and buy another one like you would buy another Playstation and Bob's your uncle.
Gamers aren't tinkerers anymore, most people don't mess with computers anymore.
If we only allow "tinkering" to mean fixing things that should work, sure: Stuff works better today. But I include hardware tuning and software modding in that too, and both are vastly more powerful and present than they were in the 90s.
My experience ~30 years ago involves a 386, big-box computer, Window 3.1 pre-installed. My options for tinkering (outside the battle for HIMEM) were pressing a turbo button and hex-editing File Manager to File Mangler. There was no hardware modding scene at that level, just a choice of massively expensive storage and RAM. I'm sure there was more that you could describe as maintenance but I don't consider myself any less of a hacker because I don't have to run "hdsit" before I shut down.
Did I do more stuff? Sure. I didn't have a huge number of games so writing your own, playing with tools was pretty much your only option, and I would agree with a characterisation that people fiddle with computers less because they have less contact time with an actual desktop environment outside of the browser. We are spoilt for choice.
But PC gamers still tinker. The have hardware options unimaginable in the 90s and the scale of game modding scenes for things like The Witcher 3, GTA5, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Minecraft, Souls and Rimworld eclipse those efforts in the 90s, many times over. Shader beautifiers weren't even possible. Is it niche? Probably, but PC gaming has always been niche.
Completely with you on matchmaking. The pathetic limits on these things. You've not lived until you've had a dozen friends all try to climb in/on a drop ship in Tribes 2 in a 64v64 match. That was worth carting a CRT to a lan gaming convention alone. But I don't believe players prefer this, they just don't have a choice. I much prefer the old server-list model.