a lot of the most successful game making tools for beginners are genre specific - stuff like Ren'Py (visual novels), Twine (interactive fiction), PuzzleScript (sokoban-likes), RPG maker (c'mon), and so on. even when these tools are subverted towards a different end - e.g. RPG maker horror games - the genre foundation provides a language to work with that's more intuitive to someone just starting out in game development.
from what i've seen, action games genres don't really have equivalent tools - or at least as popular ones? if i'm wrong let me know, but it seems like most of that stuff is still relegated to more generalized tools like game maker. part of this might be that action games are just a little finickier and more granular in nature in a way that resists toolage. and actually, when i think about it, the closest thing to what i'm thinking about might have been like... game maker 8 or klik and play, which there doesn't seem to be a modern equivalent of?
at any rate, i feel like watching the course of amateur game development over the last couple decades the arc has bent away from actiony stuff to more narrative stuff, and at a distance it seems like a good part of that is attributable to what the accessible tools are at the time. of course there's nothing wrong with narrative stuff !! but 2d action stuff can be a rich space for people just starting out, and i suspect closer to what some people want to make when they imagine making games. i'd love to see what a hobbyist scene where making a masocore platformer or a shmup was as easy to jump into as a bitsy game would look like