Different person, but thank you for the writeup! Very interesting.
For anyone else reading: Please write more comments like this, they're one of the best parts of HN.
If anyone wants to make their own: The free e-book Ray Tracing Gems II [1] covers realtime GPU ray tracing with modern APIs and hardware acceleration, and has a chapter about spectral rendering (Chapter 42: Efficient spectral rendering on the GPU for predictive rendering).
This is just complaining about "the youth these days", with some snark about how they consume media "wrong". It even calls them entitled, just like those articles about millennials!
In an economy in recession with awful wages and banks falling over, only just recovering from a pandemic, is it surprising that people want to spend less money?
On another note: content creators aren't individuals, they're small businesses with employees and contractors like any other and if that business is unsustainable, no matter the reason, then that business failing is the free market working as intended. Every business needs to adapt to the realities they face.