not sure if this applies to you directly, but here's my 2¢:
1. a lot of people fall for the meme and drink the koolaid that if you spend 6+ years doing nothing more than studying then BOOM, you'll graduate and companies will just blindly start throwing money at your face. surprise surprise, it doesn't work like that.
2. people should follow their passion and everything but they should also at least keep an eye on the market.
3. students (not universities) should really start considering an university course unfinished without some kind of internship. if you manage to get an internship in a company that uses the tech you're interested into (in your case, gis) you can either realize you don't like it that much or understand what the direction for your studies need to be in order to be more proficient. (applying for internships is sampling the market, btw)
4. specialists are only needed up to a certain points. in most situations a good generalists can learn enough to get the ball rolling and bring home results. see like an 80-20 pareto principle or something like that. btw, a good generalist can surpass a specialist over time.
> I blame the internet and the accessibility of knowledge to the point where people can go "IDK WTF this is, but lemme google it".
the people you complain about probably can already do a lot of other useful stuff, to the point they can just "lemme google it".
Now, there's a massive ecosystem of open-source GIS: PostGIS is probably the standout, but also QGIS, everything around OSM, GDAL/OGR, and a hundred others. For government work and some parts of academia then Esri still dominates, but there's now much more to "geo".
Now this is a net good thing, but there are downsides. Generalists wielding specialist tools means that a lot of the wonky basics aren't known until things break. But this is a blip compared to the step-change of making an entire field accessible to anyone who's a decent programmer with a healthy appetite for research. It's crazy how much you can spin up with PostGIS, Python, Mapbox and/or Leaflet...no ESRI license needed.
And since it was charity and had a bunch of private data Google was not an option ($$$$), so I (just a full-stack developer back then) was like "listen I have no idea what is this GIS stuff, but I'll give it a try", after a quick research boom PostGIS, reading the docs and testing things, plus QGIS to visualize and to help understand it better 10/10!
That was my unintentional "career" shift, thanks to PostGIS I'm now a senior dev at the largest food delivery company (local), specialized in GIS and realtime data driven systems using PostGIS everyday lol