I think there's the problem of pretending to be something that one is not - when people have always tried to associate themselves and the things they did with the cool 'in-group' of genuinely inspiring people, to the point where the fakery was in your face - think of companies meaninglessly cramming 'AI' or 'crypto' into their products.

The example I used is incredibly clear-cut, and is the subject of ridicule, but when the boundaries blurrier, people have managed to get away with this sleight of hand.

The point I want to make: the technologist who designs next-gen semiconductor processes or planes that fly faster and further, is categorically, qualitatively different from the one who writes code for ecommerce websites.

No points for guessing which group has lobbied successfully for erasing this distinction.

This is a civilizational issue. Despite allegedly a group of technocrats being charge of society, who do everything in the name of progress, there has been very little progress outside the field of AI during the past decade.

And this was true even a decade ago - this article argues against progress in software engineering - saying all new stuff is useless, and for the record they turned out to be mostly right, all new stuff did turn out to be meh. Curiously, it names node as one of the hot new things of his era - though it's exactly the opposite, node succeeded, because it managed to transplant the validated engineering and mindshare of js devs to the backend and other domains, so even when new, it chose the niche of 'boring' tech.