Just my $.02...
It might be the golden age to some people, but only because they don't have any context. OK...how many arcades are there in your town today? When's the last time you saw a pinball machine in a laundromat? A 7-11? A gas station? A barbershop? A roller rink? The American Legion hall? The drive-in (the movie kind and the burger kind)? Oh...in a newsstand? The bus station in my town always had two or three games, the Greyhound and the Trailways. Movie theater? They were EVERYWHERE.
If you go to your local high school on Monday and ask the first boy you saw "Where's the closest place to play pinball?" He would have no clue.
Three, five-ball games for a quarter was my pricing. I made $1.75 an hour bagging groceries, so I could play 21 games, 105 balls, for an hour's pay. At $8 an hour today at a McD's, you can MAYBE play 8 games, 24 balls, for an hour's pay.
A wedgehead sold new for $350 or so in the 60's. I could have bought one for 200 hours of work. Today, the McD's kid would have to work 750 hours to by a $6,000 Stern.
I don't know how many games Stern makes a year, but I do know that Gottlieb made 13,000 Jack in the Box/Jumpin Jacks in 1973. THAT was "golden".
Relatively speaking, pinball is extinct today, and out of reach for the average person.