I'm one of those younger people. Having graduated from a CS program recently, I think that the main point of that degree was to teach me a wide range of relevant concepts and ideas in math and computer science that should allow me to reason about lots of different topics in the field.
I don't think the degree should be optimized toward hireability, but to me its value has still greatly diminished. My assumption was that the CS degree wouldn't follow every whim of the industry, but will still give me enough skills and knowledge to be able to pick up anything CS-related without too much extra training. There's no promise of a job, but there was an expectation that you were learning something useful and versatile that you could then turn into a tech job with some added work. Now, the value of all that has mostly vanished.
Instead of just one tech niche being automated away, leaving the others relatively intact, AI has plugged every opening that people like me could get into at the start of their careers, and this effect is the same across almost the entire industry. And for the people who got in, their employers are already valuing those fundamentals less and less as workers are encouraged to paper over any gaps in knowledge with AI. The relevance of all those learned skills has fallen. I think the only people this doesn't negatively impact are ones who are dead set on going into academia and becoming a researcher in a CS field. And maybe not even then, as AI seems to be taking the spotlight from most other research and is getting shoehorned into every new idea. Thinking the degree is a job training exercise and expecting your core skills to be relevant after graduation at all outside academia are different positions.
Can I ask about the uniform width formatting? Is this some convention from the old days, like formatting text to perfectly fit on a terminal screen?