I'm assuming you mean they are on CRUD as in most projects are what I call 'simple I/O'. Data goes into a database, data comes out of a database, and the job of the developer is just to make that happen.

For the most part, that is true, but I don't think you can blame that on the 'industry', that's the 'market'. The majority of the market didn't/doesn't need anything more than that.

However, if you have the skills, there are lots of jobs out there in data-analytics, robotics, etc. etc. (depending on where you are) that probably wouldn't have been available if we were ALL neck deep building every CRUD app from scratch. The frameworks make average people right faster and better code.

Hell, they help me write better and faster code. I'm no coding genius, but I've built apps in rails, and it is faster than when I was building everything by hand in PHP.

I haven't been doing much CRUD lately, seems like Front-End has taken the majority of my time in the last few years, but that's part of the 'craft' of being a developer. I actually find front-end more challenging and rewarding than CRUD (these days) simply because frameworks have made CRUD so easy.

I never did desktop development so don't know about there, but some must have been good.