That's not how it works. If a minority of people like Thing A when they're teenagers that doesn't mean suddenly when they're adults everyone will like Thing A. It just means a minority of adults will like Thing A.

Put another way, what do you think happened to all the "normal" kids? They would have become adults too, so wouldn't you expect the "normal" to replace the previous and outgoing generation rather than this one particular minority?

Nah, in the 90s nerdy kids were definitely the minority, even among kids.

What happened is that in early to mid 2000s, careers that nerdy kids flocked to became desirable because they were well paid.

To this day I think there is something vaguely amusing regarding the push to get more girls to code, and how it is implied that women don't flock to it as some kind of conspiracy to keep them away from nice jobs or whatever.

By all means, I think this push is a good thing. Especially as I have a daughter and I'll certainly teach her the ropes when she is a little older, maybe try to code some silly games with her, that sort of stuff.

But in the 90s when I was a kid? Girls were absolutely repeled by anything nerdy. When my group of friends found a girl that had any remote interest in nerdy things, they would fall over one another to try to accommodate her. Fairly pathetic when I remember in hindsight. There was this active desire to feel less as outcasts by having our own tastes validated by someone from the outgroup, that sort of thing.

It was a different world. Weird to think that it was a mere 3 decades ago.