I think you could go to gearslutz.com and see a forum full of folks that would confirm my point :)
I would also argue that while maybe the general sound quality has improved with technology(a 4 track cassette recorder can only sound so good) the music is not similarly improved. There are great songs written today, as there was 40-50 years ago, but the technology isnt the reason.
Anyway, I will concede that in the right hands a great studio full of awesome gear will make a better product than a cigar box guitar, pots and pans and a mini cassette recorder. The point I was really making is dont expect technology to make you write good music. It can inspire creativity, but you need to have the spark and put in the work...
With only a bartered acoustic guitar, I used tricks (disconnecting the erase head wires) to layer on standard cassette and create songs. A friend loaned me his cassette 4-track for a weekend and I knocked out 7 tracks.
This was in the 80's.
Now with the luxury of hard disk recording, and essentially a whole studio on my laptop, I instead post to HN. ;-)
What can I say, I'm old and not as moved by the creative passions of youth.
Maybe "creativity finds a way" is another way to put it.
Ive experienced a similar abundence paralysis, theres too much option and that is exhausting. As soon as you go minimalist the creativity and the desire do come back. You can then sprinkle some extras here and there but with caution
Gearslutz.com is, generally speaking, a bit over-focused on gear sometimes (posts about hardware for instance dominate the electronic music forum in a world where software pretty much dominates everything in that department). :)
I think though that this article was focusing more on accessibility, at least, that was my takeaway. There are many sub-genres and scenes of music that might not initially make the most money compared to top slick commercial pop production. In the early 1980s, the initial cost of equipment to make and record certain styles of music could be a barrier of sorts.
To make something like, say, electro in the early 1980s, you would have to purchase... something. A synthesizer and a drum machine / sequencer is probably minimum requirements. Juan Atkins for instance lists his gear for his Cybotron days here [1], it's not "minimal" or "pawn shop" level for sure. Generally speaking, the home studio was still "demo" level recordings in the 1980s (there are exceptions); "Clear" likewise was recorded at a couple of professional studios and mastered at a separate studio.
Not all artists were doing this much, of course. But there is a reason that the sampling drum machines of the late 1980s (Akai MPC 60 and Emu SP 1200) were seen as "democratising"; previously, the barrier of entry to create sampling oriented beats was much higher, and now, all of a sudden, there was a relatively affordable machine that could allow you to do this.
These days, with a laptop, you could probably pretty easily make an electro style track using free or low-cost plugins and DAWs.
You are correct though, that all the gear in the world won't make a difference if the ideas aren't good (and even Mr. Atkins says this himself in that interview, "you don't want to go out and invest in all that gear just to push a couple of preset buttons and make a track that 20 people across the world could have already made."). I just think that the greater affordability and quality of today's equipment allows more artists to realize their vision (and if it also allows more hobby level people to be able to afford to just play around a bit, that's okay too :) ).
I would also argue that while maybe the general sound quality has improved with technology(a 4 track cassette recorder can only sound so good) the music is not similarly improved. There are great songs written today, as there was 40-50 years ago, but the technology isnt the reason.
Anyway, I will concede that in the right hands a great studio full of awesome gear will make a better product than a cigar box guitar, pots and pans and a mini cassette recorder. The point I was really making is dont expect technology to make you write good music. It can inspire creativity, but you need to have the spark and put in the work...