> Thanks to LLM assistance I hope to never have to hand-write code that converts XML to JSON ever again.
There is that. Although, if you need, say, to convert .fbx to Collada, there won't be enough examples out there for an LLM to infer how to do it. There's progress; most tools that wrangle meshes now speak glTF, so at least you only need O(N) converters, not O(N^2).
There are a number of programming in the large problems that tend not to be taught. A large collection of problems revolve around having state in one place that you want somewhere else. Sometimes you can just pack up the whole state and send it. That works if it's not too big and doesn't change too often. Perhaps the data is huge. Or somebody isn't allowed full access to it. Or it's changing rapidly. Or you need to keep up with changes with low latency. Or you must have guaranteed eventual consistency. Those problems come up all the time in areas from finance to game dev.
Inefficient solutions to such problems lead to bloated browsers, slow web pages, and inefficient back ends.
An example is XMLRPC.
Efficient solutions to those problems are complex, hard to modify, obscure, and hard to debug. An example is the internal representation of Microsoft Word .doc documents. Much of the web is trying to ship state from somewhere to somewhere else, in rather bulky ways.
This can have business implications. In the metaverse area, where I've been doing some things, Improbable tried to deal with such synchronization problems in a very general way. They blew through about US$400 million in venture capital, and produced a working system that needs so much server capacity that five indy games went bust, and their big demo, Otherside, is so expensive to run that they only turn it on for demos a few times a year.
This may also be why Meta blew their metaverse business so badly and spent so much money.
Doing this by special casing code results in an obscure, hard to modify system with race conditions and consistentency problems. That's the classic MMO approach, and is used by Second Life/Open Simulator.
A general understanding of such problems is useful, and is teachable. But what do you read for that? Not books on "how to do thing X in framework Y".