I think it mostly explained by that in earlier days most people who dived into programming did it because it interested them. Then it became one of most lucrative career path, and naturally it saw surge of people, who do not share same interests. Relative amount of people invested in dive bombing into meaty details dropped, but it quite possible that absolute amount have not declined by much.

My type is a dying breed too, the guys who do their best to write robust code and actually trying to consider edge cases, race conditions, properly sized variables and efficient use of cycles, all the things that embedded guys have done as "embedded" evolved from 6800 to Pic, Atmel and then ESP platforms.

Now people seem to have embraced "move fast and break things" but that's the exact opposite to how embedded is supposed to be done. Don't get me wrong there is some great ESP code out there but there's also a shitload of buggy and poorly documented libraries and devices that require far too many power cycles to keep functioning.

In my opinion one power cycle is too many in the embedded world. Your code should not leak memory. We grew up with BYTES of RAM to use, memory leaks were unthinkable!

And don't get me started on the appalling mess that modern engineers can make with functional block inside a PLC, or their seeming lack of knowledge of industrial control standards that have existed since before the PLC.

I've not been a dev for that long, but I've been a dev for 15y or so. For the most part it seems to me like that is an effect of business decisions; workers will learn the skills that get recognized. Which skills those are has changed over time.

I don't see older devs have that quality particularly more then younger devs, what I see is businesses that don't value that type of behavior. And having worked with "wild West cowboy" coders before, the businesses may be right; they often make a real mess things and just rely on other people to clean up after them.

From what I've seen, there are lots of young people who invest in themselves and have passion for the craft, when the business allows them room to grow and doesn't treat them like a code-producing machine.