Since the beginning of the industrial era, people have been looking for side artisan-gigs to distract from how droll their day job is. This isn’t particularly different than woodworking, gardening, knitting and the legion of other hobbies used for this purpose.

I do not think at the early industrial revolution people looked for artisan-gigs, considering the hours, child labour, and general lack of safety.

Happy to be proved wrong, I find that period very interesting.

I suppose it’s more of a Victorian thing but it’s also primarily the domain of the white collar class.

Someone who does carpentry as their day job is probably not going to do woodshop in the garage at home even today, but they just pick other things, like grilling.

It'll depend on who you ask and what lens you look in. "small" for a dev is very different from a consumer

And when you split into disciplines it gets even more murky. VN's are "small" for a programmer (you may not even need to program for many of them) but can be hundreds of art assets for an artist to work on. Likewise, something like Dwarf Fortress didn't even have a GUI at first but is filled to the brim with simulation state for a programmer to manage.

And if course that definition is relative. Final Fantasy VII was top of the line in 1997 and took 5+years, but it'd be at best a beefy 2-3 man project over a few years today.

I assumed small was referring to how much time/effort it takes to make them.

That’s surely part of it. But people’s senses are warped. They’ll often point to games that are small in content but clearly non trivial dev tasks.