I haven't worked in industry for a while now but from your accounts it seems like... nothing's changed?
Sturgeon's law very much applies to software engineers. I'm sorry but the vast majority of people in my junior cohort I wouldn't hire to replace my lightbulb. Of course they're all in on LLMs. They'll be doing what they were doing best, generating tons of awful code they copied from somewhere else that the adults in the room will have to clean up later, just the generation and copying is now paid at a $100 monthly subscription.
Like seriously, it doesn't matter even a tiny bit the code got generated by a bullshit machine when the code is Node.JS anyway. If you're building a giant penis out of cow dung it doesn't matter who your construction crew is and how good they are. And the industry is like 90% building giant penises than never come to fruition anyway.
This is really weird because every single person in academia I talked to about non-CS stuff is either a perfectly median centrist social-democrat or literally a member of the local communist party, with zero variation in between those two.
Like it's either you're a young idealist that still believes the world can be better, or you're 40 with three kids and a mortgage that just wants the government to be relatively stable and not fuck shit up for you.
I know zero Americans though, so maybe there's a skew there.