The problem is usually in the company culture and hiring process.

Are the QA people & team treated like partners, first class citizens, and screened well the way you would an SWE?

Or are they treated like inferior replaceable cogs, resourced from a 3rd party consulting body shop with high turnover?

You get what you hire for.

We hired a guy with an English Lit degree as QA. He was super smart, and really self-motivated. He learned full-stack dev, and wrote a fcking amazing dashboard and test config wizard in like half a year. (This was before AI)

People at that point were complaining about tests being hard to run for YEARS.

He then left for a dev role at another company in a short time.

Why would you upskill as a QA when you can become a dev? Every single QA person I know only became a QA as a stepping stone. That's now it's seen.

Companies don't care about QA, so of course you don't see any QA wizards anymore.

Necessary but insufficient. On several projects where I was the lead I started honoring the QA lead's attempts at vetoing a release. I was willing to explain why I thought changes we had made answered any concerns that QA had, or did not, but if the lead said No then I wasn't going to push a release.

If you're consistent about it, you can restore a sizable chunk of power to the QA team, just by respecting that No. With three people 'in charge' of the project instead of two, you get restoration of Checks and Balances. Once in a while Product and QA came to me to ask us to stop some nonsense. Occasionally Product and Dev wanted to know why things were slipping past QA. But 2/3rds of the interventions were QA and Dev telling Product to knock something off because it was destroying Quality and/or morale.

God do I miss QA and being able to go 2 against one versus the person whose job description requires them to be good at arguing for bullshit.