The main reason for this is that most people/recruiters/companies are too lazy and uncaring and incompetent to identify the better candidates without relying on

The main reason for this is that most people/recruiters/companies are too lazy and uncaring and incompetent to identify the better candidates without relying on buzzwords. Chasing buzzwords is the path of least resistance. It's also a little bit like "nobody got fired for buying IBM". Insecure recruiters/organisations who have no ability to use other means of identifying good engineers rely on the perceived safety of finding "$buzzword ninja". If things don't turn out too well and a generalist was hired it's easy to blame the people involved with "you obviously hired someone who had nothing to do with this". There are two categories of companies that tend to avoid this. One is tiny smart startups with savvy founders. The other is giants with strong engineering culture like Google and Netflix who have the resources and the will and the long term incentives to prioritise finding good employees over buzzword matching.