My personal opinion is that true engineering, which revolves around turning complex theory into working practice, has seen a decline in grace. Why spend a lot of time trying to master the art of engineering if you can ride the wave of engineering services and get away with it?

In true hacker spirit, I don't think trying to train a model on a wonky GPU is something that needs an ROI for the individual engineer. It's something they do because they yearn to acquire knowledge.