Where are my people at these days?
They don't want to engage in intellectual/nerdy pissing contests, nor do they want to jump through a million burning hoops to increase their total compensation. They want to show up 9 o'clock, do their work, and leave around 5 - and that's that.
No hacky side projects. No late evenings reading up on shiny new tools, no grinding leetcode and prepping for interviews, no hustles.
(You'll find the geeky hackers at startups, open-source projects, etc.)
At different times for example it was typical for a doctor, architect, or pilot to be an informally educated enthusiast. As programming has matured into a broadly relevant and economically important domain, the dynamics of who does it and how they learn it change, as it also did in those other fields.
You can lament the change but it's never coming back.
And there's certainly still space for people who are curious and intrinsically motivated if you think about the whole pie growing rather than just being cut up differently.
There is just a lot more noise than signal now.