These days, the possibilities for hobbyist electronics are endless.
You can still use breadboards and discrete components to experiment with the basics, but now you've got the world of microcontrollers and FPGAs to explore, you can use open-source tools to design custom PCBs and have them manufactured inexpensively, you can 3D print housings or mechanical parts for your projects, you can build inexpensive IOT devices with ESP8266 modules, you can do things with robotics and drones that we could hardly imagine in the 80s, and it's all more affordable then ever (although stock shortages of certain items may still be a problem...)
Relating to the shortages, I'd love to learn to dump and replace the firmware on all the obsolete routers, ip cameras, smartphones, nas, etc. To do whatever I want. There is no reason you couldn't make a modern wifi niu talk zigbee and listen to your electric meter, its all software. We should own our hardware.
You can still use breadboards and discrete components to experiment with the basics, but now you've got the world of microcontrollers and FPGAs to explore, you can use open-source tools to design custom PCBs and have them manufactured inexpensively, you can 3D print housings or mechanical parts for your projects, you can build inexpensive IOT devices with ESP8266 modules, you can do things with robotics and drones that we could hardly imagine in the 80s, and it's all more affordable then ever (although stock shortages of certain items may still be a problem...)