I'd be interested in seeing an analysis that traces the programming language paths built into university curricula and how those paths have tended to change over the years. The weakening of theory components is also of interest. My sense is that the trends are real, based on what I've noticed and conversations with instructors in higher education, but I don't have an empirical dataset to support it.
A decent theoretical model can be extrapolated from Goodhart's law. Graduates' performance on programming and leetcode-style interviews is a measure that many stakeholders care about, so it's a target for university departments that would lose value as a measure of educational quality. As a CS department optimizes its performance on that measure, elements of the curriculum are reprioritized. It becomes okay for the department to sacrifice educational quality in order to enhance performance on the measure. What doesn't go directly into the measure, such as experience outside of a core programming language intended for programming interviews, gets chipped away over the years through market pressures as universities' graduates compete for relative performance on the measure. This is a theoretical model, but to me it's convincing.
What's some evidence of this trend you can think of?