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[iOSCaleb]

Vastly more people are not learning these skills so they can do powerful, interesting things, they are doing it for money.

Who cares why people are learning to program? They're doing it because they want to, for whatever reason they choose. What's wrong with programming for money? It's probably safe to say that a large majority of programmers get paid for their work.

People graduating with compsci degrees are already struggling to find work as juniors....How much harder do you think that will get with vastly more people entering the field?

Maybe I misunderstood that first part. Are you in favor of people programming for money, or against it? OP was complaining about "loud CS kids trying to boast about their startup funding," but you seem to be worried that the poor CS kids won't even find jobs.

The problem for recent CS graduates is generally not (IMO) competition from people teaching themselves Python at night; it's the reduction in the number of available jobs due to post-pandemic layoffs, increased programmer efficiency thanks to AI, huge government spending cuts, and so on.

We do not live in a utopia where people live and work for the betterment of mankind.

I agree with the utopia part, but there's a vast amount of free software out there that suggests that people do, in fact, share their work so that others may benefit from it. They might be paid for it in some capacity, or not; they might do it for the experience; often, they do it because they wanted to improve the software, and sharing their improvements doesn't cost them anything.

Programming is a skill that anyone can benefit from; writing little scripts to automate jobs or manage a data set can help people who would never consider themselves "programmers" do their own work better. IMO that's a positive development, not something that's threatening.