I'm not sure clay is the best analogy; at some point it just comes rigid and you have to throw it out. In which case if that was always the case, nothing really changed.

What we've done though is really reduce the cost of clay and its availability.

Good clay was expensive to come by, not cheap and difficult to procure, now it's wildly available.

A good developer now will have to be better to think and communicate as the code quality is becoming less important. I don't like it but it's the world we live in.