Interesting observation, and something I hadn't really though about. For my own stuff I increasingly pick older technologies, not really retro, like jcs does here. Personally I think I've just grown tired of the modern "stuff", it's way to complex for me to find it relaxing to write a few lines of code for the fun of it. I wonder if that's true in a boarder sense for others working in IT.
I've watched a few of these videos, where jcs just hacks away on his old Mac and I'm extremely impressed with what's actually possible on these old machine. I do think the compile times would drive me insane, but others might see it as a nice little break.