less and less for hackers and more and more for the general publicI think this is the "excuse" but to me it seems like it's as much about "locking down" as "dumbing down".
History moves in cycles [0] and I'm seeing something like how we transitioned from Home Computers to game consoles in the mid 90s.
Hackers are experts at getting value out of equipment that the manufacturers never expected, and this is what you want with a nascent technology, to help build a market. But as things mature, as a business you want to lock down more and more of this creative potential for yourself and lock in the revenue.
We've seen it with music like this: Vinyl (locked down) -> tapes (hackable) -> CDs (locked down) -> CD Writers -> MP3s (hackable) -> Streaming (locked down) -> ... (tapes? [1])
We've seen it with home computing like this: Pong & Atari -> Commodore, Spectrum, Apple II -> NES, Master System -> Amiga, Atari ST -> SNES, Genesis -> PC -> Playstation -> The Apple Renaissance -> The Ripened Apple
Even on a smaller scale I can see Apple's pivot from "Rip, Mix, Burn" [2] to doing away with personal music altogether over the course of 10 years [3]
Or my PS4 where I'm more and more likely to just download a game now than go out to the shops and buy a disc.
At each stage there is a trade-off. You get a slightly more polished product, but you lose a certain degree of agency over it. I guess it's cyclical because the "locking down" goes a little too far and then people loses interest and then you need to bring in the hackers again to jump start the community once more. I'm sure there's some tie in with the innovators dilemma [4]
I think the only popular industry I can think of that has resisted broad-scale hacking is the movie industry. I can only speculate that the scale, and political importance meant they had to always stay ahead of the curve.
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/06/cassette-tapes-are-back-ki...
[2] https://www.macworld.com/article/2934175/think-retro-rip-rip...
[3] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/06/apple-shutting-i...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma