I mean, I wrote two introductory curricula on it, Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Robotics, and Robots and Invention. Were they consumer-level, internationally marketable type of robotics systems? No. They involved Lego Mindstorms, Fischertechnik, and a Chinese robot that never took off called the Shanghai Grandar ASM-II (that looked like a Roomba with bump, light, sound, and sonar sensors). It was enough to know that, with programming skills, it's a matter of managing inputs, outputs, and processing. It's just breaking down each step into individual problems and solving them one by one. A few stepper motors, some tactile sensors, a webcam... you're not going to be mass producing it, and it might fall apart every day, but there are high schoolers making bionic arms. Some Arduino boards, some camera identification code (which I've used to make flash games). It's where you begin, and you can do a lot just with that. Finding a makerspace, learning to write code. it can totally be democratized. Off-the-shelf hardware can be used for prototyping, open source libraries are developed all the time, and communities work with each other to promote enthusiasts to try out their ideas.

It's bad enough folks want to gatekeep art, now we want to gatekeep robotics? Why are so many people so insistent that "average" folks need to "stay in their lane"? There was a time when kids had chemistry sets, erector sets, microscopes, electronics kits, wood burning, carpentry... having kids learn as much as possible and try them out firsthand was encouraged. The idea that "this is something only a certain group should be doing" is disheartening.