I'm starting to think that people don't want to be programmers anymore, they want to be managers who delegate their work to someone or something else, and then come back, critique the work, and do another loop

And this is exactly the problem. Developers are happily passing off their biggest valuable asset to, essentially, their replacements while, at the same time, convincing themselves that them playing the "ideas guy" or "conductor" roles is the real value they bring to the table.

Like, get real!

I feel like I'm rapidly going insane. It wasn't that long ago when many people in this forum would boldly exclaim that their software development skills were their capital and take pride in their ability to build stuff. It also wasn't that long ago when the "ideas guys" were a meme here.

We're ceding almost all of our bargaining power because programming "was never valuable." And we're doing it with smiles from ear to ear.

I'm thinking back to my contracting days when a typical customer might have a team of ten people but only one or two did the bulk of the work. Now the whole team can be productive for whatever measure you use for productivity.

It's not so great for the one or two but fantastic for everybody else.

Well yeah! This is objectively a great process for getting a lot of work done.