Of course, anyone would agree that if wishes were fishes, QAs should not exist. We would all use agile with cross-functional teams. Every single team member can do any work that may be needed. All team members can take time off any time they need to because we have full coverage and the world is a beautiful place.

Of course, none of this is true in the real world.

For example, just last week we had a QA essentially bring down our web application on staging environment always reproducible with a sequence of four clicks. Follow the sequence with about the proper timing and boom, exception.

Should this have been caught before a single line of code was written? Yes, it should have been caught before any code was written. However, the reality is that it did not. Should this have been caught by some unit test? Integration test? End to end test? Code review? I'd argue as we barrel down a world of AI slop, we need to slow down more. We need QA more than ever.