It has been a pretty common trend for the last few years of people breaking out of the “OOP style programming” and practices they were taught at university. I am not saying avoiding things like over abstraction is new, but I do think there is a newer generation of programmers who have been taught and warned about drawbacks from practices like that.

Similarly, my anecdotal experience tells me more newer game devs are aware of basic memory practices being better than overly complex OOP code. Think flat arrays and simple cache alignment over something abstract and over engineered

It is mostly soft skill type stuff. For example, something goes wrong and veers from an original plan, and you have to come up with a solution and adapt in the moment.

I personally think that some people can provide “10x” (arbitrary) the value on occasion, like the low hanging fruit you said. I also believe some people are slightly more skilled than others, and get more results out of their work. That said, there are so many ways for somebody to have an impact that doesn’t have to immediate, that I find the term itself too prevalent.