I started working for reals in IT in 1997 and however bad the 10x Rockstar Developer shit is now: It was worse back then. Systems and networks, programmers, didn't matter, the whole industry had the kind of overwhelming superiority complex you only see in crypto dipshits who are one week from having to sell their Tesla because they put their entire savings into Memecoin and ugly JPEGs of stoned monkeys. Passing out on a coil of cable in the server room after working ten sixteens in a row was a point of pride.
Part of the point of 10x, Rockstar, etc horseshit is the capitalist class trying in vain to recapture our self-inflicted legendry. We were Hackers and Wizards, as opposed to the Lusers. Simon the Bastard was our Robin Hood. We were going to rule the world.
The problem with trying to recapture this, to inflict it on the workers instead of having them come up with more or less on their own, is that the mid-to-late 90s were a gold rush period thanks to massive Internet expansion. There was at least a perception that if you played your cards right and were smart enough and Very Computer enough you could be the next Bill Gates or Seymour Cray, or at least the next Gary Kildall. There were paths into the industry if you were cocky and self-taught enough that really don't exist anymore.
It's no coincidence that in the 90s we pretty self-consciously seized on the culture and legendry from previous boom eras. The previous gold rush was the mid-80s, the combination of the AI boom and the proliferation of PCs, and then before that was the iron age of the late 60s and early 70s before the first AI winter. These were all spaced fairly close together with gaps on the order of a decade or less, so it was easy for lore like the Jargon File and semi-satirical grandiosities like Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal to stay more or less current and find a new generation of eager readers.
The gold rush is over and we haven't really seen a new one since the dot-com recovery. There have been attempts to Potemkin village the perception of a new (or continued) gold rush era into existence, between the ostensible "machine learning revolution" and crypto, but it has no substance. The industry has professionalized. The "code grinders" we used to mock are now more or less everyone. We don't wear suits but only because jeans and t-shirts are the uniform. And that means people are waking up to the fact that we are workers. We're not going to invent a newer and better HTML parser and become millionaires; the C suite and the big shareholders are the ones who will keep getting richer on our work.
And we are workers, and actually recognizing it is good! It's the first step toward being able to actually improve our conditions instead of trying to get that Big Bag at the expense of the people we work with day to day.