> Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around.

This is such a flawed, but common take. Are you seriously going to claim you were never a junior dev that nobody trusted with "hard tickets"?

Note that I am not making a statement about what your skills were like when you started getting paid for dev work.

I'm saying that the "easy ticket solver" devs are an illusion. When they really fail to perform, you should ask yourself whether it's because many years of bad management undermined the motivation they may have once had. Yes it would suck to be one of those unlucky people, and I'm not saying they shouldn't get fired, but you still need to recognize the bias there. I won't comment on why they weren't given opportunities. There are so many.

Choosing dev work while lacking the necessary skills over other career paths that often pay more, whether back then or even now, is so irrational that it breaks your premise.