Option A) You truly are indispensable and critical to the project, and soon you're going to be their best-paid employee.
Option B) They will now find ways to make you dispensable. And then you'll qualify for that promotion.
I started my second job in 1999 it was for a bill processing/printing company. Companies would send us data files via ftp, we would merge the files and create files in a format used by industrial printers and mail them out. Later on we were one of the early integrators with CheckFree that was the backend for most online bill payment services.
I wrote mostly processing programs in VB6, Perl and C++. I did some GUI programming with C++/MFC/COM (ask your parents).
Fast forward to 2008, the world had moved on. But I was still using VB6 (discontinued in 2001) and C++/MFC. My compensation was only $7K more in 2008 than it was in 2000. There were other people doing the new shiny while I maintained the old systems.
I learned my lesson. Over the next 10 years, I changed jobs 5 times and doubled my income - nothing to brag about. It was still about what entry level developers get as return offers in BigTech. I was laser focused on keeping my skillset in sync with the market.
By 2017 though, I realized my market value as an enterprise dev was going to plateau in 3 years and my youngest was graduating from college. I started pivoting to “cloud” and got into “application modernization” consulting - basically a fancy term for cloud app development and deployments.
I got my current job in consulting in about two years ago.
I work at the one company that pays decently well for AWS + enterprise dev + consulting. It’s not hard to guess which one it is..