While I'm extremely new to the hobby, I think the ease of transitioning from successful and simple extract kits to all grain using biab with very little extra cash (and physical space) involved is a huge part of what hooked me. I'm ignorant to when the biab concept really took off, but I can see that being a huge returning factor if it wasn't really on the table for a brewer 10-20 years ago. Again, I have little to nothing to compare it against, but was brewing software as readily available? I dredge up a lot of old posts and online articles during intense, late night, half-cocked google searches, and it seems that the process has gotten a heck of a lot simpler, with much improved, easily found equipment and ingredients. I've given samples to acquittances that brewed (and have since quit) decades ago and more than a few couldn't believe the beer they drank was a simple 15 minute extract pale ale. While there are definitely some serious advanced techniques, a guy can make a case of damn good beer with a 5G kettle, a bag, and the brew ingredients.
I had always sworn off brewing until this year when my wife randomly bought me some things and just kinda said "Try it, you'll like it. I know you." And I did. But my only other experience in making beer was helping a friend make some super sketchy counter top beer in a milk carton in about 2005. I can't recall the name or the packaging, but I imagine it was some fly by night company that no longer exists. It was the single worst beer I had drank, and that includes the 12 pack of pigs eye we found in a road ditch when I was 15.
I asked a friends dad why he had quit brewing while we ran into each other at a wedding a couple weeks back. He replied that he always brewed about once every 6 weeks. Then he skipped a brew, then the one after that. Then, suddenly, it was a year later and he still hadn't brewed. He made it sound like, for him, brewing was one of those hobbies that just fell off the map after he skipped a couple times. I find it hard to understand that feeling, but maybe I'll get there in a few years haha.
There is something to that. Weird trends follow recessions.
While craft beer has always been lacking in my rural area, and grocery stores in my state don't sell alcohol, I wish I could remember when I started to notice variety. I always scoffed at the weird cans and bottle labels when I'd walk through as I excitedly reached for a case of Busch light and a bottle of Windsor. Oh, the beers I left behind...