I have come to realize that code (and I think possibly productivity in general) being expensive was always a feature. I am sure that a few great ideas did get lost to obscurity due to lack of access to resources to build them out. However, we now have an absolute deluge of complete and utter shite.

Agreed, for the individual LLMs can be powerful to let less technical folks build and customize their software - at an org level I reckon we'll start seeing more sinking ships as that bottleneck was actually helpful at limiting the flow of lackluster features to prod.