Agreed, sometimes it seems like there are only two types of roles. Maintaining / updating hot mess legacy code bases for an established company or work 100 hours a week building a new hot mess code base for a startup. Obviously oversimplifying but just my very limited experience scoping out postings and talking to people about current jobs.

Regardless this just made me shudder thinking about the weird little ocean of (now maybe dwindling) random underpaid contract jobs for a few hours a month maintaining ancient Wordpress sites...

Surely that can't be our fate...

> Developers do that too.

Not at that speed. Scale remains to be seen, so far I'm aware only of hobby-project wreck anecdotes.