This echos my sentiments with trade work and repair skills, everyone claims it is so valuable and rare skills, but the job market doesn't seem to agree with it. There are people with 30 years of experience that could build a house from scratch then go home and rebuild their car engine, but are barely making more than people waiting tables at Olive Garden.

What skills people think are valuable and prized, and what skills corporations are willing to pay for, are often very different.

You’re right. Hiring depends on revenue streams. Code being cheaper means less coders needed for same code. Less-sr-coders-needed means more senior engineers competing for limited architect/leadership roles.

However, the happy path is that as more code is written, more revenue streams will be developed and more sr engineers will be needed and hired to manage those ballooning codebases. That will be a gradual process of growing the pie though.