> My guess is that people nowadays are gradually moving away from raw CUDA programming and moving towards things like Triton etc

Your guess is wrong. Besides the fact that there's much more to life than matmul (for which triton is just ok), the other obvious fact is that triton has exactly 1 frontend (python) and there's much more to life than that frontend.

I find that basically in every thread about low-level work there's someone making some weird comment about how triton or mojo or XYZ supplants CUDA or assembly or whatever. I can't understand how this comes about because absolutely no one working in these areas thinks XYZ is going to supplant anything. So it's invariably outsiders making these claims and I cannot fathom why any outsider would be motivated to make claims from the outside.