Nobody said it's malicious. In this industry, every year of experience has diminishing real returns. That is to say, I'm embarrassed by my relative effectiveness many years ago as a new dev. It was mostly thanks to defaulting to the latest and greatest tools. The bits of wisdom and trickery accumulated over the years certainly help, but they don't really move the needle in a way that would justify substantially higher pay, or consideration over younger, less jaded/burned out candidates. The industry's most commonly used CS knowledge can easily be acquired in a year.

Overall it's a pretty lousy line of work, but it beats being an Uber/Instacart serf... what a world.