The point about skill is absolutely key. Two types of engineer now exist: Those that are largely "code monkeys" implementing features using high level tooling

The point about skill is absolutely key. Two types of engineer now exist: Those that are largely "code monkeys" implementing features using high level tooling and guard rails and those that are responsible for building that tooling and low level components. FWIW I've met plenty of engineers even from FAANG companies with fairly limited exposure to writing performant software. Over time, the former bucket has grown significantly as barriers to entry have dropped but this has led to extremely bloated and inefficient codebases. Deployment patterns like micro services running on container orchestration platforms mean that it's easier to scale bad code horizontally pretty easily and these "high level frameworks" are generally "good enough" in terms of latency per-request. So the only time efficiency ever becomes a concern for most companies are when cost becomes an issue. It'll be interesting to see how this all unfolds. I wouldn't be surprised if the huge incoming supply of unskilled engineers doesn't cause compensation to drop significantly in general.