Not real talk.

To have a market for something you need people to find it valuable.

What drove the shift in values?

could have been a pressure to decrease wages, decreasing quality in exchange for increased quantity of code.

Alright, if we were to replace "quantity of code" with something like "feature velocity", I might agree that something like that could be the case.

Of course, then the next question is: how was this accomplished?

I mean, we're talking people's values here - i.e. the preferences of economic actors - IIUC the phenomenon underlying the entire market model?

Are those so flimsy so as to be completely overwritten in a generation's time? Is this something that happens every generation?