> A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?

Because our ways of programming computers are still woefully inadequate and rudimentary. This is why we have a tons of technique for code reuse, yet we keep reinventing the wheel because they shatter in contact with reality. OOP was supposed to save us all in the 1990s, we've seen how it went.

In other fields we've had a lot of time to figure out basic patterns and components that can be endlessly reused. Imagine if car manufacturers had to reinvent the screw, the piston, the gear and lubricants for every new car model.

One example that has bugged me for a decade is: we've been in the Internet era for decades at this point, yet we spend a lot of time reinventing communication. An average programmer can't spend two days without having to deal with JSON serialization, or connectivity, or sending notifications about the state of a process. What about adding authentication and authorization? There is a whole cottage industry to simplify something that should be, by now, almost as basic as multiplying two integers. Isn't that utter madness? It is a miracle we can build complex systems at all when we have to focus on this minutiae that pop up in every single application.

Now we have intelligences that can create code, using the same inadequate language of grunts and groans we use ourselves in our day to day.

Standardization and regulation forced a lot of the physical industries to change as the industrial revolution progressed. Before that point standards didn't really exist, especially over any large areas and technological progress suffered because of that. After that point solutions became much closer to drag and drop than what they were before.

The question is, at what point of progress will it benefit the software industry.