maybe there's a cultural failure - where if we consider a 'generation' of devs to be in cohorts of 10years. they have failed to pass knowledge down. hence why the wheel keeps getting reinvented.

every industry grows & refines itself by knowledge & skill getting passed down. software is the one anomaly. & right now with LLMs they're tryna kill juniors.

which boils down to 'culture'

We don't consciously think about every heartbeat or work out how all the light in the spectrum creates vision. Some things are best left solved. Paying hundreds of thousands people in an economy to be CSS masters is just wasteful. It's solved. Move on.

Tech experts have been quick to automate away other people's professions. The boot's now on the other foot.

Re: your pro-specialist argument -

"Specialists cost more because you either need to pay more to hire them, or you need to pay for the time it takes for somebody to become a specialist. But the productivity improvements should more than outweigh the cost."

Here lies the problem. I'm not sure the productivity improvements do outweigh the cost according to the metrics businesses track and care about. the benefit to customer experience or the structural integrity of the software outweighs the cost, but that's not something business leaders are incentivized to care about in a meaningful way.

the market for artisan software is just too small