This might hold water if US software engineers weren’t significantly better off than SWEs in any other country.

You paint this bleak picture of someone agreeing to scraps to avoid starvation but the numbers are quite clear that working in software puts you way ahead of any of these countries with software labor unions.

You’ll rightly need pretty significant evidence to get people on board with a system that appears to have worse outcomes.

It’s not “literally life or death”. We have unemployment benefits, we have quite low unemployment rates and people can go work in other industries if they want to get paid like a software developer anywhere else in the world.