As we build tools to make that plumbing easier for certain use cases, we might move around in the hierarchy to plug different things together, but I don't think anything has fundamentally changed in an alarming way. We're still just moving bits around!
I remember an explanation that Sussman gave for why MIT retired the SICP course, replacing with it a course in which students program robots with Python.
He said (and I'm badly paraphrasing) that one used to be able to scale up your reasoning about how a piece of software works in a similar way to how you do it when looking at a circuit diagram: you have these little components with discrete behaviors and you can simply combine them and be able to predict the result.
Today, however, as programmers (to a greater extent than before) we create systems by cobbling together large, opaque, libraries whose properties are poorly described and require one to essentially "do science" on those black boxes.
And the trade-off is that we're often better off plugging A into B, and hence there's a lot more of that sort of line work in industry.
edit: I should say that I don't much like that sort of work, but it was unwarranted to say it is 'alarming' that the trend has gone this way.
then you force it together with whatever you have at hand, and wrap it all in a thick layer of duct tape. That's exactly like software engineering.
That's an okay salary in absolute terms, but it's not a great one for a software engineering position. Even in a fly-over state.
But taking that job is basically career suicide. After 3-5 years of doing that, you'll be completely unemployable outside of insurance unless you spend time on your own learning useful skills. And if you do that, you're probably starting back down in a junior or mid-level role.
Anyone would be much better off getting an AWS cert and learning to write SQL.