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I don't fully agree with that, IMO it's a multifaceted problem.

There's the obvious fact that tech has become the new path to high salaries, and culture changes when people are pursuing the money rather than the trade.

There's the centralisation and capture of resources - app stores in mobile, message boards moving to reddit then being astroturfed, hardware closing to repairs for water resistance/ form factor reasons...

There's also the death of piracy limiting access to resources. Apps, courses and books were files pirated massively, online services kinda stopped that.

I don't think free/open source resources failed to catch up in quality, but I do think they failed to soften friction and remove the barrier of access. Consider mastodon vs twitter, creating a website vs a facebook page, sideloading an app vs app stores, reading a manual vs an influencer course.