Webdev is where the money is. It's where people with a CS degree or programming experience are most likely to find a way to put food on the table. Everything else requires more expertise and, aside from the most specialized of applications, pays less money. So as it is, webdev is the center of the universe, and RDD is table stakes for being considered a professional in the field.

That's not quite true; most of my colleagues with CS degrees work for non-tech companies in factories (doing really boring stuff, but still).

Webdev does seem to pay better than most other stuff, though.

DBEs as well. We're constantly getting new database back ends for apps to the point that the Ops DBAs support some 9 backend database solutions. Granted, that probably falls under WebAppDevs for the most part.

Not all of them though.

Still happily using JEE/Spring/ASP.NET + VanillaJS in what concerns webdev projects.

Being old doesn't mean good. From my experience, using j2ee or spring to make a web app is grossly overcomplicated (I have heard of but not yet used spring boot). Asp.net is fine but anyone who is paying $$ for that is probably a dumbass

From my experience it still offers more performance than anything based on JavaScript, or scripting language du jour.

And while other AOT compiled languages might offer a little bit more performance, they lack in tooling and libraries.