Indeed. But my argument is that a lot of those hard problems were, in fact, already solved; some people made a career out of solving the same problems over and over again. The fact that we have a tool to automate the lower tier of problem-solving doesn't mean we are no longer solving problems—it just means we are being asked to solve higher-order problems.
But it also means we solve the same problems as before but faster, meaning less time is given to planning and thinking about what to actually build. This is a real problem where I work. Everyones grasp of what we are building and how it is connected is markedly worse nowadays.
We as a collective must learn the skill to put these new abilities to good use instead of just aiming to accelerate as much as possible.
Indeed, I solve hard problem for a living, but those are mostly design. The actual engineering often decomposes to gluing things together with limited need for new primitives.
There are hard problems at every level of abstraction. TAGE predictor optimization up to handling data-center failover.
I don't really have a challenge for people like the OP, I get it. I too dragged my feet, even mourned the death of a type of work I had grown fond of. Then I got over it and realized I might prefer the romance of riding a horse into town, but I also like that there's semi-trucks delivering fresh produce to my grocery store year round. The leverage available right now is frankly insane. The one thing an "old dev" [as he self-labeled] can be sure of is that the younger generations will not share these hang-ups to the same degree and it's those people who will inherit the burden of maintaining and furthering the digital world.
After 20 years of coding, I do understand the grief and the sense of loss—I felt it deeply myself. But as an engineer, I was also captivated by the capabilities of the new systems. Watching these systems mechanize the thinking I had been doing for years, struggle in areas I used to struggle with, and even outperform me in some areas is nothing short of a magical experience, leaving all the anxiety about the job aside. Personally, I chose to focus on that magic, to see how far we can push these tools and discover what their limits are.
What is also interesting is that what our brains perceive to be hard is mainly because we didn't evolve to deal with these kinds of problems. But as it turns out, automating logical problems is much easier than folding clothes.