How is this different from previous layers of abstraction? React/JS dev don't have to think about memory management or a million other things that C++ application devs did. Instead that cognitive load is unbundled onto the framework maintainers, and frontend devs can be much more productive.

Obviously react/js didn't cause job apocalypse... Quite the opposite. It's just another abstraction layer making it possible to build a full application with less text. Prompts are the same pattern again IMO

It is different because writing a spec to tell AI what it wants is much easier than writing React/JS. The market reflects that.