I'd say that those high quality things that still exist do so despite of the higher volume of junk and they mostly exist because of other reasons/unique circumstances. (Individual pride, craftsmanship, people doing things as a hobby/without financial constraints etc)

In a landscape where the market is mostly filled with junk by spending anything on "quality" any commercial product is essentially losing money.

The problem is that with the amount of low-quality stuff we're seeing, and with the expansion of the low-quality frenzy into the realm of information dissemination, it can become prohibitively difficult to distinguish the high-quality stuff. What matters is not the "total quality" but sort of like the expected value of the quality you can access in practice, and I feel like in at least some areas that has gone down.

> but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier

I truly don't see this happening anymore. Maybe it did before?

If there's real competition, maybe this does happen. We don't have it and it'll never last in capitalism since one or a few companies will always win at some point.

If you're a higher tier X, cheaper processes means you'll just enjoy bigger profit margins and eventually decide to start the enshittification phase since you're a monopoly/oligopoly, so why not?

As for FOSS, well, we'll have more crappy AI generated apps that are full of vulnerabilities and will become unmaintainable. We already have hordes of garbage "contributions" to FOSS generated by these AI systems worsening the lives of maintainers.

Is that really higher quality? I reckon it's only higher quantity with more potential to lower quality of even higher-tier software.