Even with the best education, tooling and copy-paste resources, it still takes at least 4-5 years to become competent. In my opinion, entry-level quality as consistently dropped over the last 20 years.

It's not, juniors are as bad as they were 2 years ago. Generally it's politically easier to nerf better paid employees than cheap ones.

You can have the socialist argument of "hey senior engineer, take a salary cut / no raise for the common good, to avoid layoffs of junior engineers - which btw would be the first to go as they're not as productive as you are" and I've seen plenty of senior engineers accept that. Their livelihood are not as stake so they'll take one for the team, forgetting that it's a for profit company which can't find the money.

In the above scenario, I refused and I wasn't fired - but I also started looking for a job and switched 2 weeks after the above episode happened.

How is that a socialist argument? Telling workers to share resources because the company refuses to reduce its profit margin sounds capitalist to me.