100% agreed. I venture that it's a side effect of our industry relying almost entirely on universities and self-learning to propagate knowledge, instead of trade schools. Academics don't want to teach "messy" real world skills like how to actually build a distributed computer with your own hands: there's a very narrow range of skills considered acceptable to teach in the academic world and sysadmin isn't one of them.

Meanwhile we've had 20 years of media and culture telling people that those who get rich are the software guys, never the infrastructure guys, and that the easiest way to get into the industry is by learning web design.

Also, I suspect the industry is exhausting the pool of talent that learned computing on UNIX workstations at university in the 80s and early-mid 90s. The people who lived and breathed servers and UNIX are retiring out of the workforce, and not really being replaced. AWS is stepping in the fill the breach by selling sysadmins-as-a-service, basically, with a thin veneer of GUI programming slapped on top, and some proper documentation writers. Selling pickaxes and shovels to the gold miners - classic.

Finally, I think a lot of firms have developed a "no contractors" policy. I've never worked at a company that allowed contractors and I'm about mid-way through my own career, a bit less. At some point it has become received CEO wisdom that they're building a committed team of true believers, so "mercenaries" aren't welcome. It leads to the kind of thinking you see in this thread where "I don't have the skills, therefore I must hire someone full time, and they must earn as much as me, therefore it's too expensive" ends up leading to "and therefore I must outsource to a firm that 'contracts' for an hourly rate billed via credit card".

The contractor has a problem similar to employee turnover. Contractors make sense when there is a throw-away project (won't need long-term maintenance) that doesn't embody any proprietary knowledge or skill. As soon as a project could expose a trade secret or require on-going support, the contractor becomes a big risk.