AM reception is essentially the direct conversion of the strength (amplitude) of a given radio frequency into an audio signal. Any other noise present at the same frequency is added to the signal (superposition/interference) and therefore impacts the strength of that frequency at the receiver. Therefore it is impossible for the receiver to know whether the amplitude it received is just signal or is signal plus noise.
The claim 'the effect of random noise is to amplitude modulate' is probably not 100% correct, because to my understanding it's not actually performing modulation (the modulation happens at the transmitter but the noise happens between the transmitter and receiver), but it is impacting the amplitude at a given frequency and to a receiver this is impossible to know whether said change in amplitude happened before modulation (signal) or after modulation (noise).
FM works better because it is easier to detect the change in frequency independently of any change in the amplitude.
I'm unsure of what the correct terminology would be, but (for my linear algebra brain) you could say something like, for FM the noise dimension is orthogonal to the signal dimension, while for AM the noise and signal dimensions are the same. Therefore for FM any change in amplitude in the noise dimension should be mostly isolated from the signal dimension, while it is essentially impossible to tell what is noise and what is signal for AM - you could probably do some radio equivalent of a differential pair in order to detect noise and remove it, but then why would you bother when FM has improved noise rejection anyway.
My understanding of PC game development at the time was that most games would re-implement their own drivers for system hardware, hence why you would often need to select what kind of graphics card, sound card, and their settings during the setup. As such, a game running from a boot disk is closer to just skipping DOS and having no OS rather than implementing a custom OS, although from another perspective you might just say that the game is the OS.
While I generally agree with your sentiments here, and this is a somewhat pedantic response, with regard to the following:
The goal of code, however, is simply to communicate a process to a computer. Or rather, when that process is subject to change over time, to communicate a process to a computer, simply.
I would tend to disagree. Code is not about communicating with a computer. It is about communicating with humans. The computer does not care how the code is written - it is the humans that have difficulty with it. In a way, programming is the translation of a language that the computer understands into a form that humans can comprehend. Not so much the other way around. In this regard, clever is fine for a computer, but it is not always understandable to a human.
The claim 'the effect of random noise is to amplitude modulate' is probably not 100% correct, because to my understanding it's not actually performing modulation (the modulation happens at the transmitter but the noise happens between the transmitter and receiver), but it is impacting the amplitude at a given frequency and to a receiver this is impossible to know whether said change in amplitude happened before modulation (signal) or after modulation (noise).