What are you doing to help solve this problem?

"What can one do in the face of a relatively shrinking population?" is the more interesting question to me.

As someone whose managed a team before, there is a minimum population of people practically required to sustain a particular corpus of actionable information without suffering severe degradation in terms of said information's application.

Once one ends up below that point; things tend to go the way "from scratch rediscovery required", until such time as the population of people capable of acting on it is restored.

Whether that actually happens is a prioritization decision balancing against everything else that still has to be done.

Have three boys! All successful engineers. One even knows hardware and assembler!

I disagree. I think it's about pivot time, not having a warmed up stable of skilled workers just in case. Nature never optimizes for that and it shouldn't. We should lazy-load that skillset if and when it's necessary. We have writing to carry knowledge forward. Also, video and other media. People are smart and I'm sure a large cohort could be assembled with the right amount of money in fairly short order. As long as that's cheaper than keeping a battalion ready just in case, then I'd argue it's the "correct" way to approach it.