Yeah, I never got into the nitty-gritty of Battletech lore. Picked up one book and didn't finish it, because it spent 40 pages setting up a dozen people who then get wasted in the span of a paragraph or two. It'd be like the first hour of The Rock was filmed from the perspective of those soldiers who get killed off in the showers.

You won't find me objecting to blaming anything on MtG, but I have no knowledge of that in your part of the world. Here? I know D&D was just some import-exclusive game that costed an arm and a leg, required real English proficiency, and had no less than a dozen strong competitors all the way until the 3rd edition came in 2002-ish. It could be close to the top today, but it's still just one of the games to most folks. There was a phase when everyone and their mother wanted to play 5th edition in 2016-2018, but now it normalized again and it's no biggie to get 3-5 folks to play Neuroshima.

As to computers, maybe? I know that when I play on platforms like roll20 and the like, it's a godsend to have all those mechanical macros. It helps to move players' focus from rolling and cross-referencing to fun and roleplaying even during chunkier parts of the game. It may not work as well for Car Wars or Phoenix Command and similar, but I wouldn't know.