Not his or her fault the tooling obseleted the specialty knowledge.
Now, there's a massive ecosystem of open-source GIS: PostGIS is probably the standout, but also QGIS, everything around OSM, GDAL/OGR, and a hundred others. For government work and some parts of academia then Esri still dominates, but there's now much more to "geo".
Now this is a net good thing, but there are downsides. Generalists wielding specialist tools means that a lot of the wonky basics aren't known until things break. But this is a blip compared to the step-change of making an entire field accessible to anyone who's a decent programmer with a healthy appetite for research. It's crazy how much you can spin up with PostGIS, Python, Mapbox and/or Leaflet...no ESRI license needed.