I'm not gonna say you're wrong in your experiences, because there's much damnning about how people have behaved, but it needs to be taken in stride and things have changed a bit.
The demoscene always did sit in a weird intersection between technology and art, and the roots and association with piracy (that often in the beginning in large parts were teenage ganglike groups) did add a distinct "harshly" competitive edge you don't see in other art perhaps with the exception of hiphop.
However, 2 factors is changing things out to a mellower experience, one is that people have grown older and there's probably a realization for many who still participate about our mortality as people literally start to die off and few fresh faces appear.
The other is that the workload to make code that could be impressive has risen and with hardware getting faster without changing much the pure rendering quality of what pre-made engines like Unity and Unreal can accomplish (or tools like Notch, whilst being demoscene rooted still is a commercial product today). SDF's gave the scene productions an edge in achieving cool stuff for a bunch of years (still beneficial for size) but usage is spreading quickly in games today. This might be part of why many seem to have taken "refuge" in working on retro-demos since squeezing cool stuff out of old machines isn't directly comparable to what people working full time on games,etc can achieve.
As for what you can learn, yes, it's plenty of greenfield programming but "maintenance programming" gets boring quite quickly as well unless you work for a hyperscaler and/or a startup.
The demoscene always did sit in a weird intersection between technology and art, and the roots and association with piracy (that often in the beginning in large parts were teenage ganglike groups) did add a distinct "harshly" competitive edge you don't see in other art perhaps with the exception of hiphop.
However, 2 factors is changing things out to a mellower experience, one is that people have grown older and there's probably a realization for many who still participate about our mortality as people literally start to die off and few fresh faces appear.
The other is that the workload to make code that could be impressive has risen and with hardware getting faster without changing much the pure rendering quality of what pre-made engines like Unity and Unreal can accomplish (or tools like Notch, whilst being demoscene rooted still is a commercial product today). SDF's gave the scene productions an edge in achieving cool stuff for a bunch of years (still beneficial for size) but usage is spreading quickly in games today. This might be part of why many seem to have taken "refuge" in working on retro-demos since squeezing cool stuff out of old machines isn't directly comparable to what people working full time on games,etc can achieve.
As for what you can learn, yes, it's plenty of greenfield programming but "maintenance programming" gets boring quite quickly as well unless you work for a hyperscaler and/or a startup.