> The sort of people who have been able to neglect their soft skills are probably still going to be able to do so in the future. But those were always the extreme intelligence outliers, generational talent type figures.

This is just not true. Lack of soft skill never implied high intelligence, it was always and is just lack of soft skills. Some people without them are otherwise highly intelligent, others are just normal or even weaker then average.

> You far more often see moderately successful charlatans that are all talk than successful people with awful communication skills. Of course if you're able to walk the talk, that's when you can really go places.

I would argue that this is consequence of management that does NOT have soft skills. People write a lot about soft skills of engineers and simply assume management has them. They do not always, yes they then end up being bad managers ... and charlatans doing good is usually consequence of bad management without those actual people skills. Soft skills are not just about coming across nice, they are also about being able to be assertive, being able to recognize charlatans or toxic personalities and being able to deal with them (which is not the same as enabling them).

Where did I claim one implied the other?