How does it not make sense? As a software person you are completely relying on the hardware to do its job. You are putting your blind faith into the work of semiconductor engineers in order for you to get your paycheck
The place where the value is is not at all related to where the difficulties are or the bottlenecks are. The universe does not have that kind of sense of distributive justice.
Obviosly they can, assuming that these companies hire "only the best". That means that in the demand/supply calculations, the demand is not for "graduates of semiconducting programs" but "only top top graduates of semiconducating programs, ignore the rest".
That's in much shorter supply, and means that 95% of the "class of 20" aren't even considered worthy as candidates, and aren't competition for those top semicon jobs. They'll need to find work in another field (like switching to software), or low level semicon jobs.
This work style, however, is not valued at all and is actively suppressed by "flat", non-expert hierarchies that reward people for being popular and sloppy.
It works for web companies because errors have no consequences for them and the web has turned into a gigantic tabloid anyway.
A painter uses rules of thumb all of the time, yet his work is entirely dependent on chemical engineers getting their science and formulas right. Artistic painting is just one of many uses of paint (and probably its most approximate), but both the painter and the industrial product engineer need the same quality assurances regarding their colors.
Hardware needs to be solid to allow all kinds of software the freedom to be built.
MRSs would enable much more of the formal verification parts to be generated.
I've had a very angry product manager because a feature took almost a second to load. I told him that we could make it load much faster but it would be almost a week of work and he should validate the feature with customers before we invest in that. "Of course we need this feature! It's core to the product!". So we spent a week. It worked realty nicely and scaled pretty well. In the next 12 months the feature changed completely twice because customers didn't find it useful. Then it was removed entirely and then we had to bring it back because the sales team liked it for demos. All that iteration was required to find what the market needed, not fit technical reasons, except for the performance work which was entirely wasted because it all got redone after the first user feedback.