Of course, the industry has a long history of automating and abstracting tasks. Usually there's plenty more work to be done but it does tend to mean that a lot of low-level tasks get devalued over time and, if your value is mostly a willingness to roll up your sleeves and do a lot of low-value grunt work, well...

Needs also change. Someone somewhere is probably still hiring x86 assembly language programmers for embedded work but they're probably not the highest-paid jobs and you'd likely better be especially expert. And some skills and knowledge just don't matter much any more--at least if they haven't been transferred to newer domains where they can still be applied.Probably, no one want to hire the world's leading consultant on some specific obsolete proprietary architecture.