I have a hypothesis that the proportion of really nerdy kids that take to technology hasn't changed and it was always a subset of society. People with affinity for understanding their computer and that find technical concepts natural may just be the oddballs.
My son has found his way to it from watching youtube videos on history of computer viruses. I think it's the path from Minecraft, Minecraft hacks, Minecraft mods....
He recently asked me if we could install windows xp on virtual box like one of the youtuber he watches did. So we set that up. He has been watching youtube about secret features, testing them out and found out what happens when you delete random file in system32. He doesn't get why none of his friends understand anything he says to them about this stuff. In his mind he wonder why aren't they all watching this stuff? I had to explain he's got some pretty niche hobbies even by my standards.
I agree, the proportion of really nerdy kids is the same, it's the proportion of really nerdy junior hires that has changed. There are both more jobs and more people trying to earn good money in tech, so you can no longer assume that your devs are nerds that are happy to go beyond their skillset to squash a puzzling bug.
I'd expand on that and say that we're forcing computers onto people who don't understand them in the first place, which aligns with what you're saying.
The same number of people are interested in tech/computers and want to have a deeper understanding, but because tech has become so required, we're seeing people who are only going to do the bare minimum.
Ironically, I can make the case that programming killed Real(TM) technical competence.
"Back in my day you had to solve dense differential equations to design a circuit to get a filtered output on a amplifier! And then you had to manually build it! Nowadays these kids just use libraries and pass it variables to get the output they want!"
I don't think technical competence goes away, it just changes form from what you recognize as technical competence.
As a new and naive parent I thought I would get my kid into hacking and computers by giving them a laptop with a basic Linux install as their first computer. I had visions of teaching them how to program and doing cool things with Arduino and kinds of awesome hacker projects.
All I achieved was to convince them that computers are hard and stupid and not fun, and that iPads and Playstation are superior in every way.
From the late 1970s to the late 1980s or early 1990s, typing BASIC in yourself was the fastest dopamine hit you could get. You could just do something. You could have an idea and see it become real. It was addicting. It changed us.
Since the early 1990s, pre-packaged games and social media have delivered more dopamine faster. It's changed children and teenagers, but it's changing them in a different way than BASIC changed their parents.
I think a lot of it is goals/rewards. I got into computing as a kid because I wanted to play games that I saw in screenshots in magazines. Then I wanted the game I got running to run faster. Then i’m losing online so suddenly I’m learning about ping/networking.
Fast forward a decade and I end up being a programmer. Most people won’t learn technical things just for the hell of it.
Computer programming and all that is quite difficult. I don't think kids are likely to get it before about 10-12. I was a very bright kid, into computers from an early age, but programming came much later. I found the ideas of computers interesting though. When my dad explained how microkernels and monolithic kernels differed to me I was fascinated.
maybe you are pushing them to do things with computers too early and you would have more success if you focused more on trying to capture their wonder.
This is backed up by Jean Pieget's theory of cognitive development (specifically the transition from the concrete operational stage to the formal operational stage): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget#Stages
To me this is a thing, I wonder how may kids out there hack their Computers if they even have one.
In spite of AI, I expect a huge shortage of real programmers in 10 years or so and the teenagers of the 90s start retiring.