The picture was never quite as black and white as you're suggesting, I think, though certainly there were plenty of the kind of people you mentioned around. For example, some people working in web world have always just built stuff directly in-browser rather than slicing Photoshop images. This wasn't a new idea when responsive sites came along, nor when SPAs started to become a serious business; those trends just provided more awareness to some people who hadn't thought of working that way before. Some people expanded from a programming background into making more interactive web sites rather than from a design background, and it probably would never have occurred to them not to at least consider building with the native technologies from day one.

It's true that as those front-end technologies develop, more substantial programming work is being done on the browser side, and so there has been a degree of specialisation in the roles involved, particularly in larger organisations. Even so, I'm not personally a fan of trying to maintain too strict a division between those roles. As with almost anything in a technical field, if you don't have at least a basic working knowledge of related skills and technologies, you're probably not going to be very good at whatever specialist task you're trying to do either. Similarly, if some key decisions and resources aren't managed by all of the relevant people collectively, problems will inevitably creep in for those who weren't as involved as they should have been.

While that naming sounds a bit too MBA-ish for my ears, it does a good job capturing a concept that I have been trying to pin down for a while now in terms of the types of job candidates that have worked out best for me. Thank you for the metaphor, and for what it's worth, I agree in it being a desirable skill distribution.

Incidentally, people at our company who have acquired said combination of wide skill breadth with a specific skill depth, got there because one employer or another (not always us) hired them when they were intent on (or already in the process of) a change of role. For instance, someone with a few years in graphics design who, when given a chance to (or being required to) work with HTML and CSS, found that not only did they like it, they wanted to learn and do more, even if that meant transitioning

There are all sorts of questions I have about how that might fit into the arc of someone's career, how it affects salaries, and so on. Furthermore, I do not think it should be the only lens by which to assess people's skills, at the exclusion of all else. It just seems that many of our A-Players, as it were, came into our organization with that sort of skill distribution, or quickly grew to have it.