Metalworking, lathes, precision tooling, are all way more valuable skills and tools today than they ever were before the industrial revolution.

I suspect that over time a good grasp of fundamentals and great tooling will only get more valuable in software as well as automation expands, in whichever form.

Automation expands the demand for skills. It can never diminish it. Required variety indicates that complexity doesn't go away with automation, and at some level someone will have to understand and make decisions about complex issues. You can't automate all the way down. Or, put another way, everything is already automated all the way down. The expansion of automation as we perceive it is merely the growth of complexity over new dimensions.

Or put a third way: automation means two different things: constraint and liberty. The confusion arising from not discerning which one is in force makes it seems like one can grow unbounded. Liberty requires constraint and vice versa.