There are only two valid business answers:

1. hiring/firing frequency.

2. Elimination of training.

Everything else is secondary and nothing else comes close.

This is true enough that competing pressure almost universally comes from law suits and regulatory compliance. Generally, even competition is not enough to steer the ship in a different direction. It is not about making money. It is only about avoiding loss of money from penalties. Money is made from licensing and contracts completely irrespective of the development and/or maintenance costs. The costs of writing software is challenging to estimate and so it is either measured in release duration only or discarded outright.

Implicit to hiring/firing frequency is the cost of training. Elimination of training requires that training occur from somewhere, anywhere, external to the current employer. When that mindset becomes universal then nobody performs or validates training in any form. The consequence is to assume everybody is well trained based exclusively upon their employment history, which is nonsense if no employers provide training.

So software quality will continue to degrade as the quality of candidates writing that software continues to degrade. It is interesting to watch through the lens of Dunning-Kruger stupidity, because developers commonly believe this nonsense literally. Its why so many developers call themselves engineers and yet can't read a ruler, or any other measuring implement.

Just about everybody anticipates AI will greatly accelerate this sprint to the bottom.