Firstly, this is the first I've heard about newer CS degrees not having classes on compilers, etc. and are now just 4 year boot camps that focus on AWS, React, etc. If true, thanks for this insight! Helpful to know about the current landscape of CS education. (at least for the not so prestigious universities as you mentioned)
Secondly, I'm not sure if you've spent time in different industries? While you may still be building what amounts to CRUD apps in different industries, your work can be very different and you can have very different learnings. For example, I worked in social games (i.e. FB) and mobile games a decade+ ago, for several years. Engineering was all about high traffic, high performance backends; squeezing every bit of speed possible, handling large amount of concurrents and DAU while keeping systems up. Over the next couple of jobs, eventually I landed in real estate transaction tech, which is almost a polar opposite -- very small amount of traffic relatively, but needing to be very robust and well-designed at every level from API to data store to schemas to ETL. Design patterns and concerns etc. are completely different; to me it's a whole different world of software engineering. I imagine if you move the opposite direction, you would see just as much drastic differences.
Secondly, I'm not sure if you've spent time in different industries? While you may still be building what amounts to CRUD apps in different industries, your work can be very different and you can have very different learnings. For example, I worked in social games (i.e. FB) and mobile games a decade+ ago, for several years. Engineering was all about high traffic, high performance backends; squeezing every bit of speed possible, handling large amount of concurrents and DAU while keeping systems up. Over the next couple of jobs, eventually I landed in real estate transaction tech, which is almost a polar opposite -- very small amount of traffic relatively, but needing to be very robust and well-designed at every level from API to data store to schemas to ETL. Design patterns and concerns etc. are completely different; to me it's a whole different world of software engineering. I imagine if you move the opposite direction, you would see just as much drastic differences.