[klabb3]

I think there's truth to this but you're glossing over details that are critical. If the amount of variation between products were countable and predictable as you paint it, then you'd only need designers and a cms specialist who can configure the product. As a web shop, this is much cheaper to do. There are tons of website builders today which has saturated the "simple" market, but "intermediate" customers have small variations that still need custom integration work.

All in all, saying that dev work is repetetive is a hard sell, because if it was, you could just automate it. And we clearly haven't automated even the space of medium-complexity web apps yet.

[WorldMaker]

I pointed to two clear examples where we as an industry have automated it (Django's Admin app, Excel), and I could name tons more (Access, Power Automate, InfoPath, Power Apps, SharePoint Apps, SharePoint Lists, and those are just the Microsoft side of the list; you mention CMS specialists and we could list out of the box CMSes for days).

> still need custom integration work

Define "need" here. I already threw some shade at this by accusing many companies of thinking their every need is a special little snowflake that needs lots of custom tweaks and custom specifics. In my practical experience so much more of that is "want" rather than "need". They want to feel special. They want to feel like they have control. They don't want to pay for the cheap out of the box CMS because it might imply to their executives and shareholders that their entire business is cheap and easily automated.

Some of these CRUD apps are truly "John Hammond syndrome" apps: they want the illusion that no expense was spared. (And just like John Hammond sometimes confusing building out the gift shop and adding fancy food to the restaurant in the Visitor Center with spending enough on redundancy among the critical operations work and staff.)