I really love the encouragement. Honestly it resonates a lot with me. It shows that the craft itself is still beautiful, you just need to find the right people to mingle with.

But the real world and money blended in creates a weird corrupt mix, just like everything. Not to mention there is a real risk for people who are already has their feet in the industry but not yet senior enough to survive or to control, for example, the AI replacements. And more than likely, the seniority required is way higher than one would think. In the end, economic drives are the dominant forces.

The fact of the matter is that "the craft" is beautiful when you are free to work on academic projects that are concerned with knowledge. In practice, industrial and commercial code is rarely that beautiful. Look at the offering of dev tools designed to reign in the ugliness and help manage the chaos. I'm sort of old school in this regard, but for some time now, many devs rely on all sorts of tooling to write the code, tooling that removes a layer of contact with manual processes of programming and so forth.

It's important to distinguish between the practical and the theoretical. The flippant answers of "idealists" refuse to engage with the messy domain of facts, because it is aesthetically offensive or challenges their comfort or their nostalgia. The steam engine wasn't inevitable either, but people did choose it. How many today in this forum grumble about the loss of a world when the steam engine replaced old ways of working? The next generation won't have these sorts of hangups, just as we don't have them about steam engines. Or, if you like, how many pine for the days of assembly programming?

When something proves to be too useful industrially to opt out of, then it will be adopted. People will choose it. If you want to be Amish, go for it, but most people don't.