I used to be heavily involved in the demoscene during late 80's/early 90's. (And still occasionally visit demoparties.) I think the best thing in making demos was the feeling of achievement when you managed to get a new effect working. Of course it was a bonus if this was something never seen before, or broke some record, or even placed well in a democompo, but the feeling of "I can do this" was the main driving force behind it all for me.

Recently I've got similar feeling of achievement in DIY electronics. Back in the day making PCBs was difficult and information on how to design them was hard to find. My best attempt was an audio digitizer based on instructions from a magazine, and I never got it working because my hand-drawn PCB was so bad.

These days one can design PCBs with open-source tools and get them manufactured professionally for very cheap. There is a wealth of various microcontroller modules and add-on boards that can be used as building blocks in projects. Internet is full of design resources, and all possible components one can imagine can be ordered online.

Although I haven't participated in any IRL meetings, I think there's also something similar to demoscene in these communities, both online and IRL. It's not as competitive as demoscene used to be though (but I think that's only a good thing).

Most of these DIY electronics projects would never be possible in commercial setting because there's no viable economy behind them. However, as it's relatively cheap these days to implement even fairly complex electronics projects, we are seeing stuff that's somewhere in this intersection of non-commercial / creative / cutting edge technology - just like the demoscene used to be.