Perhaps the quality of software developers is declining because there are more software developers. Not all developers are committed to software development as a professional discipline.

In contrast, as a consultant, I have found that the sophistication and quality of software in large organizations has increased in the last ten year.

Companies that, in the past, might not have had sophisticated software environments are now deploying on cloud resources (e.g., AWS) and leveraging technologies like Spring, Microservices and messaging systems (RabbitMQ). They are often using both SQL and NoSQL databases.

This can be a challenging environment for new employees, even if they have years of experience. Even if you are familiar with a development framework (Spring) and the cloud environment, it is often used in ways that you may be unfamiliar with.