I think this is less people who grew up with C64s and more people who didn't trying to capture the magic without having to learn assembly or making sprites with graph paper and a hex editor.
Sure, but there was a whole other magic era that followed that. That also got to work with low-level assembler and direct framebuffer/video access. But wasn't constrained to 320x200x8 screens with pictograph fonts ("petscii") and POKE/PEEK.
It had other limits to explore other than shoving as much as you could into 64k of memory and 1Mhz of processing power.
It had other limits to explore other than shoving as much as you could into 64k of memory and 1Mhz of processing power.