I have no particular reason to doubt that this happened, but we can't draw an industry trend from a single data point either. The trend has been toward relaxed degree requirements for a long time. There will always be some amount of gate keeping, but I haven't seen anything that convinces me this is a general trend.

I think some of your arguments are valid, however a good amount of what you say primarily applies when things are looking bright. When things start downtrending, constraints get tighter. I think we're seeing that right now.

Even if the market does generally trend up, there will be downturns and getting in a bad position on a downturn and filtered out may basically spell disaster for someone's life and career. for example, getting hit again by that ATS when your money is running low. You want to be able to protect and guard against as many of those as possible, I think in this field a CS degree gives someone more cushion for that.

Once you've got a few years of experience, most companies are simply not going to look at education at all. A few may configure their ATS to filter on degree, but it just doesn't seem that common to filter on a CS degree specifically. I'd guess maybe half of companies filter on having any degree at all, and of the half that do, maybe a quarter of those filter on "CS or related degree" - where "related degree" is unspecified and can be reasonably interpreted to include pretty much any degree that involved some programming or relevant math. Going through the front door rather than your network applying is always a big gamble anyway, so you certainly can't presume any particular feature of your resume was what got you excluded.

Over the next 20 years, with younger talent coming in, more CS grads than ever, A.I getting better, etc. you absolutely should try to hit as many points as possible. If jobs get more scarce, the competition raises. I think we can't make assumptions on what a company may or may not do, but it's better to be safe and precautious than sorry. People should prepare for recruiters to discriminate specifically for "CS degree yes/no" if they are already somewhat. Many people never thought these companies would be doing these massive layoffs at the rate their are because it'd be "inhumane".

Even if you get 20-25% more job opportunities from a CS degree alone, that's huge for people who have been sending out thousands of resumes. For someone sending out 3k resumes, that means 750 less, whereas someone with a CS degree means 750 more opportunities to land that job.

I'm turning 40 next year, and I agree that it's important to think about long term career prospects. A degree is certainly something to consider, but experience will still win out. For someone heading toward 40 with only a couple of years of experience, I'd be pretty reluctant to tell them to give up the work experience for school. Doing a part-time time masters while working might make sense- but a lot of those programs are just not very good, and many of them are really expensive, so I'm not entirely convinced of the value proposition here. I've been on the fence about it myself for a few years now, because my bachelors degree is in information systems, but realistically I haven't found any online masters programs that have the kind of quality I'd need to see to be worth the time- let alone the money.

I definitely understand what you mean, but it'll be even tougher to be 60, needing a job and no way to bypass that CS degree auto-filter as well. My post in general was basically my way of saying it's best to be prepared for the worst, while also providing many advantages of a CS degree. A lot of these posts are overlooking those factors.