Those of us who have been around since the 80s-90s are astonished by the low productivity of today's programmers.
If it takes 1 person to run 1 microservice, we are all doomed.
If it takes 1 person to run 1 microservice, we are all doomed.
Higher levels of abstraction makes it easier to get something up and running fast, but at some point you need to be able to look under the hood and understand what's going on, and many programmers today can't do that.
That being said I think the drop in average skill is mostly a product of the growth in the number of programmers. I imagine that if the ability to sculpt a basic statue suddenly became really valuable, the skill level of the average working sculptor would plummet.
More layers of indirection in a system and more dependencies on external libraries and tooling does not necessarily get you any abstractions. To take a contemporary example, there is no "abstraction" in being driven to use Docker because your dependencies have gotten unmanageable otherwise.
I also feel that ceteris paribus, the meetings got longer, project management tools now consume a lot of input from programmers, and I need to communicate with a lot more people to get something done.
Which seems to end up meaning productivity has gone down when measured by "things end users of websites can do", even though modern FE devs end up creating much more code and html and css than "the old days". (Admittedly, if you include privacy invasion, user tracking, and various other requirements of surveillance capitalism, dev productivity has probably skyrocketed...)
Complex? We still call a function with a return value on a stackmachine.
Sorry for the negativity.
And yet, most homepages today can't be viewed without javascript. You are correct, for the end user the complexity has absolutely not resulted in better homepages but worse.