Well, that's the thing. You have to shut your programmer brain off and turn on your business brain. The code never really was that important. Delivering value to end users is the important thing, at least to the people that count.
Tim Bryce, one of the foremost experts on software methodology, hated programmers and considered them deeply sad individuals who had to compensate for their mediocre intelligence and narrow thinking by gatekeeping technology and holding the rest of the company hostage to them. And, he said upper management in corporate America agreed with him.
If you place a lot of value in being a good programmer, then to the real movers and shakers in society you are at best a tool they can use to get even richer. A tool that will soon be replaced by a machine. The time has come for programmers to level up their soft skills and social standing, and focus their intelligence on the business rather than the code. It sucks but that's the reality of the AI era.
I think we (developers) need to get over that. Code was always the means to an end, which is providing a product to solve a problem, not the end itself.
It isn't, no one is buying code on it's own - but it's a component of the product. I dislike the phrasing above since it assumes the two are distinct things.