[babypuncher]

From a consumer-facing perspective, FPGAs have enabled a golden age of reasonably affordable and upgradeable hardware for relatively niche tech hobbies.

* Replacement parts for vintage computers * Flash cartridges and optical drive emulators for older video game consoles * High-speed, high quality analog video upscalers

Many of these things aren't produced at a scale where producing bespoke chips is not really viable. Using an FPGA lets you build your product with off the shelf parts, and lets you squish bugs in the field with a firmware update.

There is also MiSTer, an open source project to re-implement a wide range of vintage computer hardware on the Terasic DE10-Nano FPGA.