We used to spend 90% of our time determining the right nail to use, the right wood to use it on, and where best to place it, and only 10% of our time on selecting and wielding the hammer. Now we spend 90+% of our time figuring out which GenericAbstractToolFactoryManagerFactoryInterface to invoke and how to properly invoke it a in such a way as to coerce it to ultimately generate something that eventually might generate something else that will hopefully drive some sort of fastener into something in such a way that will possibly hold it together, and the rest debugging why instead it is generating a generator that generates chisels that are chopping away at the foundation.
Yes, that's an exaggeration, but how much so? We are smart people, we do figure out how to use these complex combinations of systems to build functioning (bloated monstrosities of) applications. But are they really reducing technical debt or adding to it?
Are these systems really going to be easier to maintain in a few years when they have 357 dependencies that have each evolved over time (and or been abandoned)? Easier to optimize, when that means modifying what's going on under the hood of those dependencies? Easier to extend, when doing so would lead to conflicts with those dependencies?
I'm predicting that the next wave of discovery and hype in the field will be focused on improving productivity while reducing technical debt by removing the cruft that we're building now and replacing it with something simpler and more to-the-point.