One of the great things about hobbies is that there's no one right way to participate, but that doesn't stop some from acting like there is. One of my other hobbies is flying RC aircraft, mostly planes but I've dabbled in helicopters and multirotors, but a lot of people seem to belong to a specific camp. You have the old school nitro/gas balsa planes, you have the electric plane guys which is split between traditional balsa models and "foamies" that have become quite good as well as being cheap. Then a lot of the plane guys look down on the "drone" guys, the balsa guys look down on the foamie guys, etc and there are rivalries around the brand of radio gear and other seemingly trivial matters, it's all a bit odd to me.
I can certainly relate to the nostalgia aspect too, yet another hobby being vintage computers, as well as classic arcade games, I have a love for CRTs and other vacuum tubes and if I could ever fully grasp Morse code I think making a distant contact on a tube based CW set sounds like fun. I don't particularly like sitting around gabbing on the radio but there's nothing really wrong with that. In another decade or two when all the old timers are gone there will probably be a resurgence of that as a generation that has lived their whole lives with the convenience of cell phones discovers the novelty. What's old becomes new again.