[johnklos]

This:

"Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold the entire machine in their head."

This is exactly what appeals so strongly to me about Amigas. This is so true that I run AmigaDOS on real Amiga hardware and also run NetBSD on Amiga hardware (the m68k instruction set is actually understandable to me).

There's something so real and tangible about being able to look at individual chips, know how they're connected to other things, know what they're doing, and imagine the work they're doing happening in real time. Modern computers, by comparison, are amazing collections of functional black boxes that mere humans can't directly touch (some can - but how many of us are working with the kinds of electronics that can interface with DDR5, or PCIe?), so they lack the approachability of hardware we can breadboard / wire wrap.