I believe the curious developers are now almost all poking hardware, to greater or lesser degrees. The two big projects of Meshtastic and Home Assistant absorb a huge amount of that side of the ecosystem, but also things like OpenWrt.

Web and the whole cloud/backend scene has become toxic because of the work culture around them. I know of a therapist on the west coast that has become completely snowed under by a surge of software developers claiming mental problems on account of their working environments, and she was in such disbelief that she was asking around if what she was hearing was possibly real. Other professionals simply would not accept what has been going on.

Hardware unfortunately proved to be my limit. I tried getting into various things like FPGAs and various RF/telephony/networking projects, but my math ability is just too weak and decrepit.

I've seen the same and it seems due to people moving down the stack in response to LLMs being able to code at a junior-ish level and everything that entails.

I am actually re-writing a service now go run minimally on my OpenWRT home router :)