This is a good thing. That shift in expectations will hopefully prevent a total collapse of systems as inexperienced developers would have yeeted god knows what code into production.

The best part: all of the materials that were available to now-seniors are available to new juniors. The added advantage of having an LLM to explain or clarify things? Seniors didn't have that. We had to suffer.

Sorry, but the outcome is fair. Seniors had to suffer to learn and can now benefit from the speed up of AI. Juniors don't have to suffer to learn, but they do have to learn to leverage AI to help them catch up to the existing crop of seniors.

Not impossible. Not impractical. Just a different form of hard work, which, no matter how much anyone kicks and screams will always be the thing standing in the way of where you want to be.