I think the limitations are not main reason why these 8-bit computers produced many good programmers. It's the fact that they booted straight to BASIC. In many cases, that was all you had. That invited people to start experimenting.

My parents were also poor, I learned BASIC without having access to a computer except for one hour a week at school, I didn't have my own computer until many years later, I was fixing other people's computers to earn money to get components for my computer, I didn't have access to internet until around 2000, so I was learning from outdated books. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I didn't have those limitations.

Anyway, Raspberry Pi is definitely the closest thing to the experience now. You boot up the default image and you have access to a lot of programming tools. You even get to peek/poke memory to access the GPIO pins, but you have to do it as root these days. :)