People should really read the whole thing (well at least the last chapter) because it's not as simple as "vibe coders made meg go away".
The writer equally hates ZUN, vibe coders, and AI haters (Bluesky crowd)
And if not then the TLDR is basically: ZUN made the games for japanese people. Western people wanted to play the games. Reverse engineers came along but they relied on community funding. Now the community is taken apart by vibe coders but the same community is not willing to fund manual labor. Also the community is still paying for ZUN which enforces the status quo of not bothering with english releases.
He does say LLMs made things worse, even if he's not opposed to it.
What happened [0] to Lee Sedol (Expert Go Player) 10 years ago after playing against AlphaGo is now happening to everyone else.
As I said before [1] we are all Lee Sedol.
I need that on a tshirt
This is nothing like that. The disillusionment comes from imposters getting more attention and credit than the real thing. These shitty projects are nowhere near being superior to what a human can do, and most of them are blatantly lying and exaggerating their accomplishments. ie. dozens of "no emulator recompilations" that are actually just embedding an emulator into a binary with the game, and people are too fucking stupid to check and upvote it to the top of HN because we all love a good fraud here. Now this garbage can be mass-produced and get the adoration of the AI hype crowd, drowning out the content that people put hundreds/thousands of hours into despite the slop being of wildly inferior quality that doesn't hold up if you inspect it for longer than it takes you to click the upvote button. Not only here, but all over the internet. Of course it's demotivating.
Although I love the new era of LLM assisted reverse engineering, it really breaks my heart how much it negatively affect veterans in their area of passion.
So was it really a passion project if it affects them anyhow? It's like saying that concept of dynamite fishing affects passionate anglers.
Well if dynamite fishers show up in your favorite fishing spot you might want to consider moving somewhere else at least.
I don't see why it wouldn't, passion does not exists in a vacuum.
So it's about visibility and not passion?
This idea that if you want recognition for your work you aren't passionate is literally insane. Humans are social creatures by nature, the two aren't in any way exclusive.