Like said, hotrodders have always been the minority by a land slide. Go back to the 60s, vast majority of kids driving "muscle" cars, put in gas, that was it!
Most of the guys I called Gearheads in my age group have long left the hobby. It's been like that all along. One of them may have owned a 4spd BB Nova and by design through no work on their part they had a hot car. Car starts being a problem child and they sell it. That is more the case than not in the group I know....
Something else that is probably unheard of now is the group of racers who actually race their daily drivers in competition on the weekends. That means they race a class on Sunday and drive it to work on Monday. And they do it though a whole race season at any given track. Basically non-existent today. 40 years ago it was extremely common to see it...