Wonderful comment! I was about to reply here, but it spawned so many thoughts in my head that I ended up writing a longer conversation with myself :)
I also have so few free hours that my main concern is, “am I about to waste the 8 hours of hobby time I have this week?” I have this problem in video games too: I don’t want to build a character that might suck. I can’t afford to play this game twice, unlike when I was younger.
I think there’s definitely some level of truth to this fearlessness the “ignorant” have. I mentor a high school robotics team and they prototype things so fast. I think that’s also because the stakes are so low: it’s only thousands of dollars. Nobody is being fired. The competition is for fun.
So in a way, maybe it’s just a rose tinted look at younger people. Maybe they’re more fearless than us not because we lost that trait, but because we gained many more constraints.