I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

Every company I worked for didn’t give a shit about my skills. They just wanted to solve the problem in front of them and if they couldn’t then they would hire someone in with the right skills. Improving my skills was seen as a risk as I might leave.

That’s been my experience, too. But now I get a sort of, “I dunno. Maybe don’t use AI on Fridays?”

There doesn’t seem to be a plan for maintaining that culture.

Given the rest of the paragraph, I believe the parent is trying to say that merely improving developer skills is not valuable to the company, not that improving developer skills cannot provide value in terms of improved work product, morale, retention, etc.

You must be lucky then.

The opposite is true in my case - though 1 organization that had a small budget for things like AWS certs. I remember almost everyone who would get those certificates would never really learn anything from it either. They would just take the exams.