I love this take. I couldn’t say it any better, but would like to contribute to the thread by chiming in with my personal old-man experience.
I was an OG scenery modder. Nothing professional, as I was just a kid, but remember when the airport and scenery designer came out for MSFS 4.0? I’m talking about this guy, replete with early-90s-tacular cover art:
I mean, who wouldn’t want a 747 and Beechcraft a starship? However, prior to this (and subsequent scenery disk add-ons), the sim was basically centered on 5 geographic areas (SF, LA, Seattle, Chicago, and NY) and once you got away from those areas there was NOTHING in between. I mean nothing. No lakes, no rivers, no roads, no mountains, certainly no terrain (not even landclass polygons), no airports, no navaids. If you wanted to fly from LA to JFK, it was dead reckoning the entire way. Point and pray.
Even within the default scenery areas, outside of the core, you had airports that consisted of runways that were just black asphalt and centerline stripes. No lights, no numbers or other markings, certainly no taxiways or aprons, and only basic navaids like VOR and NDB. Remember, this all had to fit on a few 5.25” floppies!
If you were lucky, those areas would have a gray polygon, that was a city, and some blue lines (rivers), and gray lines (roads). But mostly it was flat, green terrain and you could activate white dots to give it texture.
But when that puppy came out I was HOOKED. Now I could re-create almost an entire airport: runways, markings, taxiways, approach lights, VASIs, ILS, terminal buildings, control towers, roads, whatever polygons I wanted, even crude mountains! I spent hours and hours trying to re-create KSMF. But even then I didn’t really know anything about the airport, so I ventured out to find material.
Turns out, for $3-ish (back then), I could get a whole trove of information from the FAA publications like terminal procedures. Wait, you mean there are more than 4 ILS in the San Francisco scenery areas? 
Actual sectional charts allowed me to create fairly close placement of VORs from coast to coast. Wanna know how I still know most of the names and locations of the (remaining) VORs in the western US? I even remember the old NDBs!
I got so into it I started learning to read and follow the charts. A friend of the family flew for American Airlines and he knew how into it I was, so he would regularly save and dump all his outdated Jeppesen charts on me. Score!
Now, was I seeing elevation changes and photogrammetry? Heck no! I had to use my imagination for a lot of it. But it got me into the system. After a few years of doing this and subsequent entries of sims like Flight Assignment:ATP into the market, someone finally came out with a US West and US East scenery disk that had basically every public airport (with lights and taxiways), all the city, road, and river polygons, and NAVAIDs for the whole country.
Now, that didn’t stop me from modding airports, but by this point I didn’t have the resources to keep up - it would have been futile, so I started to enjoy the scenery and learn about instrument flying and all the procedures that go with it (boy did I have a lot to learn!). But the bug was set and by the turn of the millennium I had earned my private pilot certificate, eventually going on to earn a commercial, a multi add-on, and an instrument rating, even though I chose to not pursue it as a career.
This sim hit at the right time. It re-kindled a passion for aviation when the world around me (and others) was looking pretty bleak. A passion for the love of GA, the nostalgia of flying, for global exploration and understanding, the joy of technical, procedural work, the country fly-in. This sim is nothing but opportunity to spread the love to people who were just like me, full of passion, inquisitiveness, and exuberance. And with multiplayer, streaming, we can enjoy doing this and learning things about aviation together, to which I’ve devoted a lot of my time. And along this new journey I’ve met some great people who are fellow enthusiasts, pilots, simmers, students, and some good friends. The virtual analog to the fly-in!
Now, of course there are still some annoyances, and there is a lot of room to improve. But y’all, let your imagination fill the gaps. Let it lead you down a path of discovery. Be patient - keep pressing for positive change, but understand the complexities involved (and the technical aspects behind the realities). I’ve been there and I’m glad to say my insistent patience has paid off.
Boy we’ve come a long way!