It all reads like hallucinated slop from top to bottom
"I've been tracking software quality metrics for three years" and then doesn't show any of the receipts, and simply lists anecdotal issues. I don't trust a single fact from this article.
My own anecdote: barely capable developers churning out webapps built on PHP and a poor understanding of Wordpress and jQuery were the norm in 2005. There's been an industry trend towards caring about the craft and writing decent code.
Most projects, even the messy ones I inherit from other teams today have Git, CI/CD, at least some tests, and a sane hosting infrastructure. They're also mosty built on decent platforms like Rails/Django/Next etc that impose some conventional structure. 20 years ago most of them were "SSH into the box and try not to break anything"
"barely capable developers churning out webapps built on PHP and a poor understanding of Wordpress and jQuery were the norm in 2005"
It was the norm in 1998 also, based on the "dotcom" era code I saw.
PHP was created in the first place because writing slop in Perl was too hard.
I have no way of knowing, but I will say I'm already fatigued with comments claiming something is AI slop. It's only going to get worse.
You're so quick to be dismissive from a claim that they "tracked" something, when that could mean a lot of things. They clearly list some major issues directly after it, but yes fail to provide direct evidence that it's getting worse. I think the idea is that we will agree based on our own observations, which imo is reasonable enough.