What happened? Is this a case of the actual job changing, or just title inflation? I’d expect the quants to be the ones doing the math and implementing the kernels…
Several things : immediately after 2008 less demand for exotics because clients were afraid of them, cutting costs rather than increasing revenue ( that’s industrialization with IT and standardization ) and more importantly, industry reaching some kind of maturity, with large quant libraries which are pretty stable these days.