Things have changed somewhat since the 80s. The nerds were often queer kids, autistic kids, or just.. kids that didn't fit in for whatever reason. It wasn't that bad in some places, but in other places, especially in the south where football was god and anti-intellectualism was a divine commandment, being visibly different could be seriously, violently dangerous.

I don't know if it makes sense to zoomers, especially people born like post 2003, but the release of the Xbox, and especially HALO:CE, was a cultural sea-change in much of the US. Gaming went from being a niche interest widely regarded as childish and cringe to something frat boys did on saturday nights. Very quickly all the nerd shit started becoming cool - video games, sci fi fantasy, and eventually comic books, TTRPGs, anime. But the way I remember it, and admittedly my memory looks like rotten swiss cheese, the XBox and Halo:CE were when being a nerd stopped being socially undesirable and frowned on and became a normative, mainstream thing. It was really strange for a few years trying to figure out what the new rules were. You can actually see some of this today; Game advertising has always been full of jackass misogyny, but post x-box gaming saw a lot of elements from sports churned in to the mix. Company's saw the wild popularity of e-sports, really just Starcraft, in Korea and they wanted very, very badly to create the same phenomena in the US. So we got all kinds of shitty e-sports modes, games started focusing their balance around competitive play instead of being fun, they started doing tie in deal with junk food and soda, with athletes, with all kinds of shit. It was deeply weird for me as a reclusive, anti social theatre kid who read sci fi books and practiced sword fighting in the back yard. Suddenly all the stuff I loved and that I had been teased about most of my life was front and center mainstream and a lot of the people I despised - I thought of them as jocks at the time but it was really small town bullies and American anti-intellectualism in retrospect, were now playing with my toys and telling each other how cool they were. It took years for society to accept that now it was cool to play video games and it wasn't just a toy for children, that you could have an interest in science fiction beyond big dumb action movies without being a loser, and so on.

Don't mistake me that I'm saying i was some kind of martyr. I bullied kids at times, I was bullied at others, and a lot of the time I was just left alone with my little nerd clique because there weren't that many hostile people where I finally ended up and the ones that did found out we could actually fight pretty good the few times they directly challenged us. But it was just a weird time, probably at least as weird as any other time.