as the other reply said, supply has increased non-linearly while the number of companies has increased linearly. Even with all the companies out there, you're getting lots of mergers and acquisitions and consolidation.

In terms of consulting, credit/loans are harder to get for smaller businesses and most software ends up being targeted toward large businesses, and so do most consultants.

It's harder to be a small business than to be a large business; therefore it's hard to pay more and since you're already as efficient as possible it's harder to get those rates up.

(Also there was wage suppression by Google and Apple and other big companies for around 5 years, that's a HUGE damper on the maximum salary which also translates into a damper on consulting rates.)

Funny, the rates for folks on embedded just keep going up ...

In my experience the rates for folks on embedded are way below market rates for the rest of the field.

Anecdotally one guy I know quit embedded to do rails development and doubled his paycheck.

+1 anecdote, had 4 years as embedded systems engineer, quit to be a junior django dev making way more. If there's one fucked up industry that's called Embedded systems :D

Supply has increased a lot.