Complete amateurs without these tools were basically limited to making big text in word processors and maybe pasting an image in there.

Being able to create a basically coherent, polished looking image is what you’d get on Fiverr for a few bucks. Mostly hustlers filling in templates, or people that know the tools but never learned design fundamentals.

Actually being a competent professional: Knowing how to visually communicate showing information hierarchy, what purely visual aspects of an image say, how different things read differently among people who might see it— e.g. does an image of an apple communicate fancy computer? teachers/school? Nutrition? Food? Produce?, etc etc etc (Good kerning and type usage, composition, gestalt, etc all come with that for free. Many think that is the point — those are tools someone can wield to do good design, they aren’t themselves good design.)

These tools let amateurs do what the fiverr crowd used to do. Unfortunately, the fiverr crowd is now being pushed into doing what entry-level new graduate professionals used to do, and the job market is kind of fucked.