how isn't b) a contradiction? You're stating the demand is there, but the developer is not seeing it? Did you mean to say the opportunity to remain in the same kind of gig is not as profitable/career advancing?
Basically. I mean the demand is there, but the developer recognizes a small island of architecture is a risk for long-term skill dev and wants compensation for that risk. For a developer to take the kind of gig that requires working bespoke air-gapped tech that sees few updates, they're going to want to be paid X+N over the median salary X (or have some guarantee of / expectation of job security).
It's a sucker's play to take the gig at price X, work on it for a year or two, and then get tossed to the curb when the project wraps with the only skills growth to show for it a combination of those ineffable fundamentals ("everything Turing-complete is fundamentally equivalent") that are useful forever (but can be picked up on any job) and some knowledge of Bob's House of Air-Gapped Machine's circa-1997 Flash install that their in-house kiosk infrastructure ran on.
There are jobs that'll pay for that Flash experience, but they're a lot harder to find than if Bob's House had been using some modern web architecture and you'd picked up, say, AWS experience.
