I think it all comes down to the death of what was, in the 90s, called the "power user."

There have always been two kinds of computer users: Administrators--those who can be trusted to administer their own systems; and Users--those who cannot, who need someone else to Administer their system for them.

The Power User emerged as a gross hybrid because of the limitations of Personal Computer OSes. In Windows 98, for example, everyone was implicitly considered an Administrator, even if they had no idea how to Administer anything. (They were Users with the full Power of an Administrator.)

What would frequently happen is that one person in an extended family would have such knowledge as to be capable of actually Administering computers, and would frequently have to drop in to perform Administrative maintenance for relatives, who had no idea they had to do such things themselves. Nobody would be looking out for the computer in the interstice.

This era is thankfully over. What do we have now? No greater number of people capable of Administering their own computers, certainly.

Instead, what happens now is that the hardware manufacturer provides hooks (the Secure Boot certificate store et al.) such that the computer's Owner can delegate Administrative power to the OS distributor (Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, etc.), leaving the Owner as a plain User. "That guy in the family who knows computers" no longer has to be involved--effectively, the OS distributor is "that guy."

This is only really a problem for people who want to Administer their own computers (though in any form-factor where you can buy a motherboard separately, all these protections can be disabled.)

Frankly, though, I see less and less of a need for people to Administer personal computers. PCs (I'm including both desktops and mobiles in this set), these days, are basically the equivalent of VT-100 terminals: fancy screens you buy, take out of the box, and plug directly into the internet.

This is what I would call the "modern tinkerer mindset":

• "Real Software" runs on Impersonal Computers: servers, either racked in your office, or existing nebulously in "the cloud." When you are developing this software, you keep a VM that simulates such an Impersonal Computer running on your Personal Computer, and interact with it as if it were a network resource.

• Development of new Operating Systems occurs using a hardware emulator (really a more precise VM), like qemu. It then moves to ordinary VM software. Everyone else who tries your hobbyist OS will only want to run it in a VM themselves. Getting it running on Real Hardware is a 1.0 feature.

• If you want to fiddle with hardware yourself, you get a Raspberry Pi, or any of innumerable other devices aimed squarely at tinkerers. You could develop an OS using these, too, although it's a much greater hassle than just using emulation software. These devices are open in ways Personal Computers never were, having everything from schematics to JTAG pins available.

Given that mindset, what do you gain by having Administration rights to your new-age VT-100 Personal Computer?

You might answer "the surety that Microsoft/Apple/etc. will never ban VM software from its platform", but no OS distributor would dream of doing this: after all, how, then, would its first- and third-party developers do their jobs? They rely on VM software just like the rest of us.