These are professional musicians with real skills, each of them with many years of training. They walked because the best case scenario was their already meagre salaries being cut.

They weren't making dev salaries after a few months of a boot camp.

After years of dedicated study, the average salary for a symphony musician is about $70,000.[1] The San Antonio musicians already only made about half that to begin with[2] and then management cut that in half - base pay of a little over $17,000 a year.

And for the people claiming this was bargaining failure, no, this ended the failures. The bargaining failures happened over many years. Many years of accepting wage and benefit cuts over and over without making management offer something in return. They didn't bargain in the past. They just rolled over and showed their bellies.

[1] First link that popped out at me, but similar numbers in other places:

https://work.chron.com/pay-scale-average-member-orchestra-52...

[2] https://www.expressnews.com/entertainment/arts-culture/artic...