You know what? Gate keeping can be a good thing. Some gates exist for a good reason. I think "are you actually interested in doing this?" is a very reasonable gate. I'm not saying all coding needs to be a passion project, obviously, but I think it's very hard to be good at a thing if you don't care about it. Software continues to get worse and worse, and software developers know less and less about the machines they're working with, and I don't think those things are unrelated.
You know what's a good gate? employement. Like great comedians of old who could make actually funny jokes, lets pull up the ladder like dave chappel and cut the kids out. I want a job and i want to stay employed in IT. I don't know what's coming but the best interest for myself is to reduce the amount of technical people and increase my rarity.