> If all you're doing is very simple crud apps and transforming API responses,

I think all of us here conflate simple with easy. It's simple in theory yes - you get some JSON from service X, maybe tweak service Y that talks to X and then feed it into some front end. In practice even very experienced engineers can take days writing or changing a simple end point or some front end because unclear requirements/bugs/micro service hell/unclear existing code/etc etc.

If it was that easy the pace and quality would have been much higher than what I'm seeing in tech companies.