Open source really flourished due to lots of sponsoring of projects, I could see an argument that money caused a golden age in 2010s, but money also attracted the type of person who could, without irony, say "It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort."

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Because my industry experience has been exactly that. It's importing stuff and puzzling packages together. There really isn't a lot of jobs where you actually have to implement interesting algorithms yourself.