[regularfry]

There's an optimistic take on this which says that in the beginning, the only people who were close enough to computing to understand what was possible were programmers and engineers, so the ideas that had currency revolved around programming and engineering. As the reach of computing has grown, the range of people who can have good ideas of what to do with a computer has grown to include half of humanity (give or take), so the ideas of what's worth doing are taken from a much bigger pool.

The trade-off is that projects which can make an impact across the entire ecosystem (like Hypercard did) must reach a much wider variety of minds, and that's incredibly hard today. However, I can almost guarantee that there are tools out there that have similar impacts to Hypercard within specific niches, with higher user stats than Hypercard ever had. You don't hear about them because the size of the pool has grown so much.