The wages for software developers were basically stagnant from 2001 to about 2014 or 2015. The big surge in pay is relatively recent. While this is a complex subject, I have written about a few examples, and can offer more. But take this as one example:

Right now the best devops people in New York City are making between $200 and $300 an hour. That's obviously good money, but in the 1990s I had older friends who were making $200 an hour as Oracle consultants. At the top, the nominal pay has remained the same, but adjusting for inflation, that is a 50% paycut.

Likewise, lower down, I know lots of mid-level devs who are happy to make $100 an hour right now, but I also had older friends who were slapping together classic VBA apps with VisualBasic, back around 1999, and they were also making $100 an hour, so, again, it's a 50% pay cut.

But it is absolutely true that pay has been surging since about 2014/2015, so I imagine the software developer pay is about to catch up to the highs of the 1990s.

It's also true that the picture only looks bad when compared to inflation. To your point, most other professions did even worse, so the benefits of being a computer programmer are more obvious if the comparison is to other professions.

All in all, after the peak in 2000, the USA economy had a difficult 15 years.