It wasn't just his generation though. I'm a Red Wings fan and I've heard similar stories from 3 European players of another generation. Fedorov talked about moving to a northern part of Russia in his childhood and basically spending all his time on the ice because he loved it and there was nothing else to do in his little town. Lidstrom actually went to a school where the main focus was hockey so he would get tons of ice-time each day. Datsyuk was interviewed once and showed the rink at his apartment building where he said he spent whole days on the ice.
Of course Gretzky famously had a backyard rink, Orr had all the ice in Parry Sound to skate on, and I recall Mario's mother talking about him being out on the rink all day in Montreal as a child. Most players today get scouted really early and get serious about training and honing their craft in their early teens, if not earlier, so I really don't see an issue with todays players in this regard. We know they spend a lot more time doing off ice training now so it's just different, not worse.
It's always been about drive, natural talent, and opportunity to get on the ice and/or train. Those things have always existed and hopefully they always will. It's not unique to one era or nation.
The thing is, I can see some here pointing to this as a reason why Bathgate's generation was "better". But isn't this section into evening things out for different eras based on what was available? So todays players have all the benefits of todays training and equipment so they need to be judged against their own peers? Makes sense. So if they weren't able to get on the ice as much as someone like Bathgate isn't that okay, because it simply wasn't available to them but that would be the case for the whole generation of players? Where do we go with this? Seems like the current era often gets punished for these types of differences but the older eras don't.
I certainly agree that players of other generations could tell stories like Bathgate where they spent all their time on the ice. No doubt these experiences allowed Fedorov, Lidstrom, and Datsyuk became the great players they were. But I would say that different times and places have allowed different experiences.
Looking specifically at the Canadian experience, and at the simplified origin stories of the great players, we can see differences over time. Take Bathgate's story and then compare to Orr, Gretzky, Lemieux, and finally Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid over time. You see a steady decline in the use of community resources, including unorganized hockey in public space, and using community facilities, and a steady rise in the use of private space (Gretzky's backyard, Crosby's basement, etc). By the time you get to Connor McDavid, he spent hours at a time rollerblading in his parents' driveway as a kid. Not out in the community playing with the neighbourhood kids. So the story for modern players is very different.
There has always been opportunity for driven and passionate young hockey players to spend several hours each day working on their hockey skills, but the last generation has probably spent most of that time practicing on their own rather than playing with other children in the community, and the opportunities that they have for organized hockey have depended in part on their parents. Today's NHL players, at least from Canada, often speak about the sacrifices that their parents had to make to allow them to reach the NHL. Huge investments of money (for equipment, team fees, tournament fees, sometimes skills coaches) and time (driving to practices, games, and tournaments). In the past a player could develop into an NHL player through use of the available community resources with relatively low investment and cost from their parents, as long as they had the talent, the passion, and the drive. Those community resources are long gone as our society has become more atomized and lost social cohesion and trust. Everything has been separated and had a dollar value placed on it. The experience that could be provided through a community at low cost can now cost upwards of ten thousand dollars a year in parental investment in time and money, and the young players still get less ice time than they would have had growing up 80 years ago, although they can get more focused and high-quality instruction.
This is my take on the Canadian experience. If you want to talk about the experience in other countries, I don't know as much but I find it interesting as well. Why have Sweden and Finland punched above their weight in terms of producing great hockey players from a small population, often from specific regions? I don't know but I suspect there is still more social cohesion there, in their athletic clubs and otherwise, than we have in Canada. I like what I've heard of their club model for sports, where there is more continuity growing up and young hockey players can be developed by top organizations, and I think it shares some of the advantages of Canada's junior hockey from the Original Six era. Why did Russian hockey development take such a hit after the Soviet Union collapsed? I'm no fan of the Soviet system and communism, but the transition away from communism in the 1990s was not handled well at all, and social institutions and social cohesion took a hit.
All of which is to say that I don't think holding Canadian talent constant as a percentage of population over time is the way to go. There's a reason the Original Six NHL was considered a golden age for hockey in the decades that followed. The league and the players grew out of a socially cohesive society with a very strong hockey culture, opportunity for children to play all the hockey they wanted, and a well-organized junior hockey development system that was integrated with NHL clubs and staffed by many NHL alumni. It's not surprising that this era produced a lot of great players and a very high average level of play.
Getting back to the topic of the thread, I'm open to arguments for more recent players like Hasek and Crosby at #5, but I would be opposed to slotting them in there because some quota system for Original Six era players says that Hull or Richard or Harvey or Beliveau can't be #5.