It's a "yes and" situation. You're completely correct that people who were already in tech just became more wealthy, but there's no question that in the mid to late teens (in particular), tech fundamentally became, for many, about $$$. There was a huge migration of people who couldn't write code from NY to SF in a "there's gold in them thar hills" kind of way.
Now the people entering the industry by and large see it as a game of wealth acquisition similar to finance or big law, and big tech is adapting in a similar way -- high salaries, insanely bad wlb, politics far exceeding any other skill as a determiner of career progression.
Same kind of thing happened in the early 2000's, when the Web suddenly took off.
For a while, if you knew how to type into a text editor, you were hired as a "webmaster." Lots of people made a lot of money, writing awful stuff.
If there's money to be made, people will pour in. They aren't necessarily bad folks, and many of them are skilled, and willing to work hard, so the trope of "thousands of terrible engineers" is maybe not that accurate.
However, I kind of despair at the management skills of the folks that run the teams, and the decision-makers that set the bar.
But the story is correct. Teams need cohesion, a lot more than rockstars. We can do together, what I can't do alone.
Now the people entering the industry by and large see it as a game of wealth acquisition similar to finance or big law, and big tech is adapting in a similar way -- high salaries, insanely bad wlb, politics far exceeding any other skill as a determiner of career progression.