I haven't really noticed much of a difference. I figured it was probably worth actually being able to wake the laptop from sleep rather than having to restart it every time.
So to check what suspend states your laptop supports run cat /sys/power/mem_sleep. It should print something like s2idle shallow [deep] with the option that is enabled having [] around it. To change the enabled option run echo "s2idle" > /sys/power/mem_sleep. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Powermanagement/Suspendandhibernate has more info.
Many modern laptops no longer support S3 sleep at all. It is likely to be an issue with the bios rather than a linux project. On my laptop, with Ryzen 7 5825U, I had to give up on S3 and use s2idle. Also had to pass "pcieaspm=off" as a kernel parameter because it would take ages to wake the ssd without it. Overall works ok. Not as good as S3 but better than nothing.
I think it was a combination of it being new at the time and there being a lot of kids playing it. Older teens/young adults often tend to not want to play with young kids. I remember everyone used to complain about, and make fun of kids (aka twelvies) playing COD. I seem to also remember people making fun of Minecraft because it was for kids. As for why it stopped, I think it just got old. The hivemind moved on to hating something else. People grew up a bit, the 12 year olds are now 17? (bloody hell time flies).
I haven't really noticed much of a difference. I figured it was probably worth actually being able to wake the laptop from sleep rather than having to restart it every time.