I'd be curious to hear from other older engineers who remember the RAD (rapid application development) explosion of the 90s with Visual Basic and Delphi.

There are obvious differences, but also similarities. Particularly:

    I've been doing some fractional work and I've been 
    getting more and more outreach from organisations that 
    don't have much development knowledge internally and 
    have come to understand the limitations of what they've 
    been building and want expert review.

There was a lot of this kind of work in the late 90s and early 2000s. The IT guy or Bob from accounting would cobble together some surprisingly effective Visual Basic apps that presented a huge win over whatever they were doing previously, but quickly grew unmaintainable.