Its not like the companies can just replace them with cheap labor. Tech requires skills that are built over years of dedication. These companies wouldn’t even be able to get foreigners to replace the tech workers because 1) language barrier, 2) culture barrier, 3) legal barrier (taxes, labor laws, etc), 4) immigration barrier, 5) time to onboard and learn the codebase. Then it would inevitable lead to unmaintainable code because these companies will want the work to be done yesterday and see no value in maintainable code.