This analogy is not the greatest. It's more like painters got obsoleted not because of cameras itself but because what people actually wanted was not artistic mastery and celestial strokes of the brush, they wanted simple, accurate portrayals of life's events. The mastery over the brush was an unfortunate necessity for a while to achieve that pedestrian aim. We didn't get what we wanted and once we did the awesome and breathtaking skill of the artist turned out to be an unnecessary over-indexing on a very particular and highly specific skill. It's still awesome and cameras cannot replicate that skill in the slightest, but that skill is not and never was what we actually wanted.

I suspect the same is happening in tech. Nobody asks for software engineering. They just want simple basic accounting of life's events. They didn't ask for kernels, FreeBSD, Ruby on Rails, interrupt handlers, register allocations, APIs, Python, Golang, Rust, HTML, containerization, USB and passkeys. They wanted a way to register that party A bought a bunch of Bs and Cs and that it was paid for using Ds. That person X is in control of Y and that this control was active in period Y through Z. I can keep going for a while. None of the bullshit we created was ever essential complexity. We are drowning in astronomical and I mean biblical amounts of accidental complexity and I feel our paintbrush moment is getting nearer by the day.