Up to this point, anyone anywhere in the world could buy a $100 notebook computer (~1/3 years' income for much of the world), take a few courses in Python or JavaScript, and find work for ~$10k.

Although this impacted a small minority, it gave nearly 100% of the people in the world a pathway to socioeconomic mobility. Although only a tiny portion of people will do that, this has a disproportionate impact; many of these pathways expand exponentially once started for a whole slew of reasons.

In other words, moving from mainframes to cheap PCs was democratizing.

This is potentially a major reversion.