I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you make it out to be.

Maintenance <> growth

Once you got a skill it’s quite hard to actually lose it. It’s like riding a bike as they say.

I find all the reading of those walls of code exercises my mind better than the writing did. I’m sure I lost memories of how to read a file by hand or balance a tree but who cares?

I am thinking about architecture and design a lot more these days and every decision I make has to be actually argued for even to myself. I can no longer lean back and say “that’s how we always do it” or “too expensive to change now” as I find many people in practice actually do. They were just coasting on premade architectural choices and their “skills” consisted of knowing arcane incantations and syntactic details completely unrelated to the (business) problem at hand.

I am not convinced many developers actually have the skills they think they have. They could wrestle syntax and mess around with tooling, but could they abstract properly? Define clear semantic boundaries? Have proper civil discussions about responsibilities and where they should lie on the right level of abstraction? Nothing has changed in that regard. If anything that part has been amplified. (“taste”)