This is not just a meme. This is a mentality.

At my last job at a big company we had HipChat rooms for all kinds of user groups. The one for frontend devs had constant discussion about their job (in)security, and every couple of weeks someone posted an article complaining about the existence of "fullstack" engineers.

I wouldn't care if this ended at chats and picture, but it's these people who deliberately push for ever increasing fronted complexity to make sure they're not easily replaceable.

The sad reality is that IT industry is currently in a bubble. It is choke-full of overspecialized tool junkies with no transferable skills. Certain complexities you "have to know" to perform basic operations are often 100% artificial and shouldn't be there in the first place.