Another contributing factor is this certain phenomenon that's happening with the academic job market. There's such an over-supply of new STEM PhD's looking for

Another contributing factor is this certain phenomenon that's happening with the academic job market. There's such an over-supply of new STEM PhD's looking for postdoc positions, it's becoming common for PIs to hire them up as super cheap programmers. On paper, they're academic postdoc researchers. But in practice, they're full-time programmers. So you end up with people who have PhDs in theoretical astrophysics or whatever, and who learned somewhere on the side how to hack things together in Matlab, working full-time as programmers and you get the inevitable result.