With the profit potential becoming more and more obvious the incentives for new people to get into systems programming has been massively increased.

Sure, like all things, 99% of them are going to be garbage but that 1% are gold.

We are still very early.

Also, regarding IDEs, most of them are not much more useful than VI if they don't have solid hyperlinking and symbol indexing databases. I don't like Java but IntelliJ's offering is the strongest in the field. Learning as you go is a lot easier when your editor is helping you learn the shape of the APIs you are using. When Goland provided interface resolution properly it cemented the app as my go-to for development.

Not everyone is as slow and patient as folk like you, and definitely, from my own experience, times were slower and less demanding back when I could have been doing my CS degree. Back then you also had to pay hundreds of dollars for API manuals and sometimes thousands of dollars for a compiler.

Nothing changes the overarching outcome that most who try, will fail. But programming is becoming a more and more important career for people to choose to get into, and like it or not, the masses of never-gonna-make-it are coming.

If you are good, and close to that 1% mark why should you care if a swarm of newbs are gonna get into C++, Go and Rust programming? More the merrier. More tutorials, better courses, and more jobs for those who can't manage to be programmer-entrepreneurs or celebrated geniuses.