I think it's a perfect storm:
  • A massive wave of new devs have been coming into the industry in the last 10-15 years because software development pays well and anyone can follow a hello world tutorial in an afternoon and call themselves "developer".
  • In the last few years automation, free or low cost services, global freelancing, and more recently AI have been reducing the number of devs you need to create something.
This means that now we have heaps of people trying to sell their dev time and the required dev time to create a goal is reduced, making it difficult for most devs to earn a lot of money.