Agree on the consultancy angle - this is woefully becoming more and more commonplace as true from-scratch engineering dies on the wayside. Do you think this can be mitigated by, say, college courses that concentrate on the base form of the programming domain? (...) like an emulation of the old days when you started learning web dev on your home computer and stayed with it until you were pretty much a journeyman engineer?

What you're proposing would be interesting yes, but I don't believe it would work out. Most student don't have the drive that we had in "old days when you started learning web dev on your home computer"... they just want to pass a few courses and graduate. I believe you know as well as I do that what you're describing required a LOT of dedication and sleepless nights and nowadays society as a whole is focused on instant gain, quick receipts (udemy courses) and 10s short videos.

IT is just suffering from the same issue, the solutions that are delivered nowadays are all just about ROI and instant delivery no matter the cost that they will have in the future. This was kind of the aftermath of SCRUM/Agile and the need to suddenly create complex software for everything just because developers are cheap and we've more CPU power available than we really need.

To be fair those development methodologies were, most likely, created so companies could onboard young and inexperienced developers very fast and get them to ship features quickly. No other field works the way IT works, people take their time to learn their craft, there are legal requirements sometimes and nobody expects you to create a Facebook clone in a week for 500 €.

All those new technologies keep pushing this "develop and deploy" quickly and commoditizing development - it's a negative feedback loop that never ends. Yes I say commoditizing development because if you look at it those techs only make it easier for the entry level developer and companies instead of hiring developers for their knowledge and ability to develop they're just hiring "cheap monkeys" that are able to configure those technologies and cloud platforms to deliver something. At the end of the they the business of those cloud companies is transforming developer knowledge into products/services that companies can buy with a click.