> Does nobody remember how most "engineers" were literally copying and pasting snippets from StackOverflow they didn't understand, and the snippets usually had tons of bugs

Not in companies I worked for, no.

> How many of you know Assembly well? How many of you can decompile a program, or write your own compiler or VM? How many of you could pass a computer science course (that you didn't take at Uni)?

None of these was ever an expectation most coders. Some are bonkers as an expectation for all.

They used to be normal expectations. My point is the "decline" is a natural movement away from highly-skilled generalists toward specialized-and-less-skilled labor and has nothing to do with AI