Was this not the point? Anyone naive enough to believe companies would keep expanding the bottom line isn't paying attention. We're seeing it also now in gamedev as art can be quickly generated and thousands of people are losing their jobs because it's "good enough".

The issue will continue to remain centered around finding replacements for senior (hah) engineers when they retire if this trend doesn't quickly start reversing. The floor cannot keep going up forever until AGI. Modern LLMs are not anywhere near AGI, so I think the reckoning will come sooner rather than later...

Stepping back... maybe this could work out fine over the medium term?

1. Lack of junior positions means people stop training for SW Dev as a career

2. Therefore software is written by a slowly shrinking band of senior people in collaboration with increasingly-powerful AI tools.

3. By the time the last senior person retires, AI is sufficiently powerful enough that no humans are required

Of course, for this to work painlessly for everyone all the parameters need to be perfectly matched, and they won't be... But maybe something like this COULD happen