Could it be due to competition from China?
The quality of code I was submitted was atrocious.
Any halfway decent Chinese firmware/embedded developer is likely going to work for a bigco where they get paid well, like Tencent or Huawei.
So parent's point still stands that Chinese competitors along with customers in the west who prioritized low cost over everything else, destroyed the embedded dev market in the west.
I'd accept "undercutting", but that's a corporate/macro pricing trend, not a trend for salaries among embedded devs in China. I suspect many companies who are undercutting pricing are getting funded by the Chinese government. They're still paying people quite well, just because they need talented engineers just as much as their competitors do.
Maybe you can but they don't exist where I live in EU and that's the only market I can speak of.