Not commenting on the mindset of earlier programmers, rather the analogy you offer: language level abstraction is entirely unlike process specialization.

For example, when moving up to C from assembler, the task of the "programmer" remains invariant and the language tool affords broader accessibility to the profession since not everyone likes to flip bytes. There is no subdivision of overall task of "coding a software product".

With AI coders, there is task specialization, and, as pointed out, what's left on the table is the least appetizing of the software tasks: being a patch monkey.

This is the issue.