For those who grew up without DLCs and microtransactions and games went unchanged after launch. How has the adjustment been to current day monetization and game updates?

I held out on getting a steam account for ages, till 2005, and even then only used it for valve games. It wasn't until 2012 that I got anything that wasn't part of a half life collection.

At this point I've more or less made peace with the concept of digital only gaming, and generally prefer the convenience, even on consoles, but I also don't bother owning consoles I can't modify, and have no hangups about pirating things to try or to have a copy I can control. For instance I've had to pirate red dead 2 despite owning a copy because the Rockstar launcher refused to work offline at the time.

As far as changes to what I buy and play, that's a whole other thing. I almost exclusively play single player titles. I keep one live service game at any point, just as a matter of having something to play communally when friends want to jump into something, used to be destiny, now it's fortnite, but the overwhelming majority of my gaming is in stuff like 7d2d, raft, cyberpunk, fallout, skyrim, that sort of thing. There's not exactly a wealth of microtransaction going on in those (barring fortnite).

And it's not like we didn't have "dlc" in the 90s, we just called em expansion packs. Starcraft had brood war, warcraft 3 had frozen throne, half life got blue shift and opfor. Are all games dlc that big? No, but most of the games I play do get sizable chunks of content. And we definitely got updates to all those.

Hell, even Pokémon games got patched back in the day via link cable, although with regard to console gaming by and large such things didn't start happening till consoles started going online.

(I'm sure my answers would probably be a little different if I hadn't grown up on pc gaming tbh)