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I don't know, man, I think there's a lot of subjective experience in that perception. VCRs are actually kinda finicky, and you would not mess with CRT TVs at home if you respected your life. Computer stuff used to be prohibitively expensive, too. And cars weren't any cheaper (I mean, where I am, your mileage may very if you're in a place that uses miles). Plus the number of people I know with a different number of fingers than they used to have because of messing with car repairs is more than one, which is several more than I'd hope.
Meanwhile the average Joe can get a crapped out C64 on the Internet for peanuts if they just want to feel useful by doing some light soldering. Or recycle a laptop into a home server for literally zero money. You can get a 3D printer for 150 bucks and spend the rest of the decade getting good at CAD or 3D sculpting for fifteen bucks per kilo of plastic.
I'm not even saying the more recent stuff is better or more accessible. It's just that middle age crises are what they are and it's easier to remember older things fondly. I was a kid, we didn't have a ton of money and I tinkered on my computer despite the fact that messing it up would have meant not having one anymore indefinitely. Plus I didn't have youtube tutorials. The first time my BIOS battery died I spent months manually entering my BIOS settings on every boot because I didn't know what had happened and had no info to find out.
The stuff I did with my parents around the house hasn't changed, it was all saws and nails and hammers and hoes. That was the same thirty years ago and three hundred years ago, too.
I'd say you're mixing up two things. It's objectively true that consumer electronics are cheaper, more disposable and less repair-minded than a few decades ago when it was all fire hazards, big fat caps and wires everywhere. It is absolutely not true that tinkering as a hobby has gotten less accessible, popular or readily available. It just shifted around a little. The tools changed, the types of things you mess around with changed, some became available that weren't (no home servers for you in the 80s!) and some became harder.
I agree with you! Its also a mind shift too though. Everything (like windows) is made for the dumbest possible person to use, and to restrict you from doing anything that may break the system, thereby not allowing learning.
unless you specifically seek out tings like r pi and solar panel building etc. Which is not tinkering, that's full on nerd engineer stuff.
Linux is risky but you definitely learn from poking around it.
The Raspberry Pi is explicitly build as a widely available tinkerer tool. Its stated goal is to be cheap and widely available. Do you know what I would have given to be able to buy a disposable computer I could slap into things in the 90s for the equivalent of 60-100 bucks? That's insane availability. We could argue about how successful they are at that goal, but it doesn't matter because there are now even cheaper knockoff boards out there. It's bonkers.
And guess what, building a IBM PC compatible at home in 1989 was nerd engineer stuff. It cost an order of magnitude more than the Pi, for a start, but it was also poorly documented, hard to get and nobody else was doing it. The only reason I got one of those at around that time is I had a relative who was an actual engineer and knew what to get.
You only remember it being accessible tinkering for the masses because you got good at it.
Incidentally, I'd argue that Linux used to be tinkering, now it's... you know, a OS.
Don't get me wrong, it's still janky, but unless you deliberately throw yourself on the deep end the most "tinkering" you have to do is copy paste a line into the command line every now and then. And I would dispute that Windows is that locked down, either. Maybe Microsoft would like to lock it down further, but you can do whatever with it. For one thing you can run Linux inside it, if we're talking about tinkering.