Your first article is based on faulty economics. When productivity increases are shared across an industry, nobody in the industry benefits. Instead, the benefits accrue to the customers and complements of the industry. There's a long historical precedent for that - productivity improvements in textile manufacturing destroyed the textile industry, productivity improvements in farming destroyed the small farmer, productivity improvements in fishing destroyed the individual fisherman.

Applied to software, the reason engineers aren't capturing most of that value is because all engineers are getting more productive. The benefit is accruing instead to those who employ engineers and those who use & purchase software. The exceptions are those fields where there are still significant barriers to entry and effective techniques are not widespread - isn't this why you want to become a data scientist?

I might buy that we're not in a salary bubble, but not for the reasons you propose. Rather, I'd say that the existence of a thriving market for startup founders is a market inefficiency. When engineers top out at $200K at a corporate job (and they don't always...I know some engineers with multi-million-$ stock grants) but can quit their job and instantly get millions in seed funding, that indicates that salaries should rise and seed funding availability should fall to bring those options back to equilibrium.