The "A Distribution of One" argument seems less convincing than the "The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal" one. I'm no expert, but if you've ever read some of the computing press from the time you'll know that custom software was still rather popular well into the '80s: and unfortunately custom software written for in-house use by a non-software company was the classic venue for all the Software Crisis war stories, which probably has a lot more to do with why it went out of fashion than progammer wages on their own. Whether the main problem was the difficulty of extracting requirements from users and management or the lack of sufficiently good software developers, maybe the arrival of LLM software cannons will be what it takes to fix it, but a hae ma doots.