I think this is the thing. Companies have always been forced rather against their immediate interests into the cost of hiring junior engineers. As soon as the idea gained traction that this cost was unnecessary, companies stopped. So: we had the post-COVID tech slump, and then immediately after, by horrible coincidence for prospective junior engineers, LLMs turned out to be good at coding. Result: a missing generation of engineers, and a giant headache in about 15 years time. But which tech exec could possibly care about what happens in 15 years?