This is a tragic disappointment a lot of (if not most (if not an overwhelming majority (if not literally all))) artists experience at some point early or late in their professional careers.
I taught art for a long time and I would always try to frame this inevitable experience as an important moment of growth. When you have to form a deeper relationship to your creative work and think strategically about how you want to support yourself long term.
There's no getting around it, it's really hard seeing what this is doing to visual artists. The few of us that could find good work doing what we love...
What's an analogy in the software world to this sort of tragic disappointment? Going from building fun videogame side projects to having to crank out dozens of over-engineered B2B SaaS microservices, for the sake of job security, for yet another sales workflow optimization tool?
instead of spending weeks thinking about and designing some sweet algorithm Knuth himself would be proud of, you write the same CRUD app with the same design patterns.
That's the change in perspective. They are inefficient from a CPU point of view. They are efficient from the perspective of "churning out more shit for less". So it's the same, soul destroying effect as for artistic professions.
There's been a bunch of similar transitions, perhaps less massive. You see the echos of them occasionally when you read people getting upset about the poor performance/resource usage of modern software. A hacker was once someone who could write assembly and packed an entire graphical operating system into 4mb of RAM. Nowadays a hacker is someone who knows what useEffect does in a ReactJS UI. The people who loved the metal, who loved knowing what every byte of their program did, they are mostly relegated now to hobby programming. Or maybe some embedded work but that's not particularly well paying. SerenityOS is a love letter to this era of development.
Or even just going from writing video games by yourself, getting to do all of it (graphics, "AI", design), to being one of a hundred programmers churning out the latest version of some "AAA" title. I now work at a FAANG, and in many ways, it is more rewarding. I'd love to be part of a five person indie studio making great games but it is a fucking lottery and my kid is heading off to college.
I taught art for a long time and I would always try to frame this inevitable experience as an important moment of growth. When you have to form a deeper relationship to your creative work and think strategically about how you want to support yourself long term.
There's no getting around it, it's really hard seeing what this is doing to visual artists. The few of us that could find good work doing what we love...