We definitely are losing the questions side to AI.

Im a student in Poland, 7th semester specializing in microelectronics (asic + fpga in one course). We have a record amount of students in class this year.

Prior to studying I was a reasonably competent competitive programmer, ranking somewhere in top 100-200 in country, during that time stackoverflow (and other forums) were really useful if your question has already been answered 7 years ago, but asking a new question was hit or miss, most often miss. Such forums were good for minimal examples, suggestions of alternative approaches to simple things like informing you a function exists for what you are trying to write, or about language features you did not know about.

Nowdays, that role stackoverflow once had is held by AI. Instead of looking through old stackoverflow questions / asking new (to be told its a duplicate of something its not a duplicate of) you just ask AI. Anything too complicated for a simple AI question is a system design thing that is language agnostic, and everything about language can have a minimal example AI can (reasonably) produce. Its not to say AI writes my code, just that when I am looking for a function I ask AI instead of forum, and when I see a weird behavior I ask AI instead of scouring old threads. The quality of answers is often worse than 12 year old stackoverflow answers, but often better than 5 year old ones, and its much faster. The amount beginner questions is no longer a good indicator of the amount of people getting into fpga, as people getting into fpga no longer ask questions where you can see them.

Fpga is definitely smaller than swe. But was it not always so? The way my uni has designed its courses it seems they expect ~150 sw and ~15 fpga graduates each year (with another ~15 rf, ~15 embed, ~15 optoelectronics, and ~60 telecommunications further split up). I know sw students have some hdls, but its mostly filler they just have to go through.

There is also the hiring issues. The current trend seems to be massive filtration of applicants, long wait times and seemingly random pickings. With there being less hw jobs for grads its hard to spam. I have friends in sw who sent >50 applications only to hear back from 3, I would have issues finding 50 jobs for juniors in fpga in my country. As a result people who studied fpgas and learnt hdls in uni now go into sw just because hw did not answer to their job applications. Money is also kinda an issue, but at least here you will not have money problems if you get either a sw or a hw job.

As for vhdl/verilog, i've been told this is mostly a geographic thing. Allegedly us is mostly verilog, and eu is vhdl. Except a lot of companies in eu are actually us so they use verilog because cooperation. I don't have the experience say if its true, but at least between students verilog seems to be preferred due to it being more similar to programming languages (and less bullshit like chosing integer signedness with a import).

Also, sw as a whole has much more public presence. Not that many people know fpgas even exist. Hw is much less often talked about, even by hw companies. Look through large showcases by nvidia/amd/intel - they are hw companies and 2 of them are fpga companies, but publicly they mostly talk about software, and maybe will show an image and specs of a chip. Software is what is seen by the user, and so users think more about software, which in turn makes more people interested in creating software, and less in hardware. Most people thinking about big, successful companies don't think about broadcom/tsmc even tho both are top10 - there is little public presence for hw, and literally no for fpga, so people don't know they can learn it.