I feel you. Similar experience on my side. I think it might've been like this before, but AI coding tools made it worse. Everybody thinks they can do it better - when there is a problem, the coding agent can just fix it. Why bother building relationships with senior devs or with anybody?

Looking deeper into it: these people don't understand the underlying foundations anymore. Just keep building fast, without building proper mental models (that would take time).

You need to advocate for yourself, because nobody else will, unless your manager is really good at his job.

Our work is largely very difficult to understand to outsiders, we need to write docs and have meetings to show what we have done. It's part of the job, and yes, if you don't do that, it doesn't matter how fantastic the software is that you wrote (sadly).

you've healed me - resonates