Many of your supposed counterpoints are straw-man. No one is expecting someone to have memorized or to reinvent KMP or this algorithm or that. What we're looking at is basic understanding and conceptual tools.

I'm just not asking anyone to believe that things are truly different than they used to be.

But things are clearly different than they were years ago. The number of CS grads has fluctuated a lot, in response to increased investment and industry bubbles bursting. Things are clearly very different today than they were in the early 90's.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

We also covered "gluing things together" in the early 90's. The concept was already very well worn even when I was a newly minted CS grad, with Jon Bentley discussing it in Programming Pearls using awk. The thing is this: We would also glue libraries together, but we did that while applying our generalist knowledge. It seems to me that there are a whole lot of CS grads who get through their entire undergrad education pretty much only doing that. Maybe that's all well and good, and they can accomplish many great things this way. However, it seems to me that much of the basic generalist knowledge is now mistakenly labeled as "specialist" and is needlessly missing from the general population.