This is shortsighted. The reason deep knowledge is more valuable is that learning anything stops being fun, and therefore presents less of a biological pull, after the first few milestones. There's a logarithmic decay in reward to effort put in. So naturally you're going to want engineers that have put in the hard work to build their knowledge, rather than the posers who read about engineering but never actually got into the nitty gritty. Why? Because it becomes rare, and scarcity drives up value. Simple!

EXAMPLE: Why would I care if my plumber also moonlights as a surgeon if all I care about is getting my faucet fixed without him passing the buck due to perceived complexity?

Those things are great in a dinner party setting, but in the professional workplace you want professionals not dabblers. Whenever I meet a self styled "generalist" nowadays I scoff. It's not hard to read HN daily and pick up on the lingo and memes and fake your way to 99% of a "generalist" in both knowledge and impression, but that doesn't make one a good engineer.