The systematic erasure of QA from the “modern” development process is pure arrogance and I hope we grow the fuck up before I retire. I’ll take early retirement over continuing as we are.
Is that a thing? Which industry/country are you in?
Today at my large tech company, QA is mostly contract employees validating test plans that the normal engineers author. Zero autonomy or ownership offered.
I've seen what great senior QA engineers can do. Proactive approaches to testing; integrating new approaches to testing; influence on architecture and design to make codebases more robust; optimizing testsuites so they can run more often; better capture of long-tail errors from production; design and implementation of scratch infrastructure to test more things before production...
It’s a very passive aggressive way to root out a problem in an organization by just removing it.
To your comment about being a path to coding: if you can code well and test well, you should skip entirely over being a software dev and go into security consulting. Instead of a 40% pay bump you could be looking at an 80% pay bump. What is a red team member but a coder with the suspicious mind of a QA person?
On the other hand, who am I kidding. Engineering and business leaders are far more likely to push the focus towards AI solutions and other shiny trends, regardless of how effective they are.