> before computer science was a profession, it was physicists and mathematicians and academics who programmed. Professionals. The professionalism has faded away as demand for software developers skyrocketed.

This is revisionist nonsense.

Programmers used to be cowboys, by and large, outside a handful of critical domains. Systematic use of code review, automated tests, source control and so on are relatively new.

What was different is an entire program could fit in one person's head. The stack of abstractions wasn't nearly as deep, necessarily, since you couldn't afford the cost in memory and CPU.

That delivered a different kind of intellectual control, a kind that is exceedingly rare nowadays outside hobby projects.