I grew up in the era of where you could download a program, ie napster, limewire, icq and be on your way

That’s not a hacker that’s a media pirate. It’s the same today. Get a VPN, a torrent client and go to piratebay. You’re there.

So what is a Hacker? Simply someone who is deeply curious about how things work and has a high aptitude for visual reasoning, making them able to figure out how to get things to do stuff the designer never intended. Such a person cannot be stopped from exploring how things work. Its in their blood. As such they will deeply learn anything they study.