I am at a point in my career where I'm figuring out where I want to spend the last 15 years of it. I don't want to work in corporate for a long stretch of it. It seems to me, being a consultant to fix all those messes could be a good seam of code face to get stuck into...

Except that isn't how it played out. Most of the Access DBs, spreadsheets, and even SharePoint, Notes, and early Salesforce apps worked just fine without any help from devs. Yes, the devs got called in when those solutions needed to scale beyond a single department, but most of them never did.

It is far more plausible that we'll see that pattern again - small, department-level vibe coded apps will be around. And things that need to scale bigger will need professionals.

Is there a company that has been more damaging to the software industry than these jokers?

Directionally, we'll have ROI by 2100 if we build 1000x more data centers. Growth mindset!

There’s a concept of an ROI

For the internet in many cases it took a decade or longer too, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

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No need, you can replace them with a single sentence.

Do the most unethical profit-maximizing thing, but also account for the eventual lawsuits and loss of goodwill in your calculation.

It makes organizations more productive at producing code and doing other tasks, but translating that into something that affects PnL is different. Where I work it's sped up individual tasks I've worked on but I don't think it's sped up delivery timelines of any of the major projects I'm involved in. We just added additional verification work with the extra cycles the engineers have now. It's not like that work is useless. It will probably mean I have less debugging to do in the future, but when you look at how the business makes money I don't see it making a big impact.