Consulting is in a weird spot right now. It used to pay well and give good projects that allowed to get experience and nice exit opportunities (aka skip few years of usual career grind).

Now lots of projects are uninteresting. There are still elite and specialized consultants who do complicated stuff but they are a minority. Often the teams now are just 'staff augmentation' - headcount outside of headcount.

For programmers consulting never really made much sense anyway. Why sit at BIG4 company making slides when you can sit in FAANG coding? Consulting was always for finance guys. But now top finance guys go to investment banking, machine learning or (as funny as it sounds) crypto. There are still good projects with good exit opportunities in finance, but it is night and day when compared to 80s or 90s - when consultants were the true elite.. just because they could see how things are made in different companies. Now the companies blog how they do stuff.