I mean, by 1400 the world population was comparable to the modern US. It merely broke the billion people mark by the early 1800s, it took merely another century to double that, and it since did more than 4x straight to 8.2 billion people, so even if the proportion of whiners stayed the same, there’d be so many more of them. Now, to that, consider we now have access to the internet.
The “cheesy sci-fi movie prop” look is usually either heavily influenced by, or quite literally, retrofuturism, which itself is very often inspired by the early computing era. Considering quantum computers are basically in their infancy, they will indeed look like a mix of old/future tech for some time.