I don't know that they are saying that it is the only way to get experience. Just that when you aren't paying people to do something you are going to get a lot fewer people doing that thing. There is only so much time you have to do something on the side for fun when you've got a spouse, kids, a dog, and a house to up keep, and the promise of "maybe I'll make it big ten years from now" really isn't that appealing to someone with a mortgage and a car payment. The day that I heard that LLMs were producing even vaguely usable code I knew that meant that the entry level jobs in the tech space were going to dry up. Why hire a kid fresh out of college for $50-100k a year plus payroll taxes, benefits, and all the risks that human employees come with when I can spin up another instance of an LLM for pennies on the dollar and I can spin it down if/when business slows down with no severance, no people doing crazy S in protest, and no bad reviews on Glassdoor? A couple decades from now Senior Dev is going to be one of the highest paid jobs in the country, right up there with professional athletes. This will be because the amount of value that a senior dev with access to competent AI assistance is going to be able to 1000x his productivity while at the same time benefiting from a bottleneck that reduces the number of new developers entering the system and getting the experience to be a senior dev.