My generation (definitely older given the replies :~) ) was sold straight onto the specialization dope. I think that smack is what's screwed the planet.
I recognized the (very, top schools) hard sell for bunkum at a very tender age. The flip side is that you don't actually become a expert much before middle age. That's also how it should be, but my second and third decades of my career were very lonely. If I would beg any sympathy for my generation's reprehensible stewardship, this might be it if I could ask without being self serving. As stands, over to you lot. Look back hard at the events in history just now being declassified. For the first time in the information era newly released history is not only relevant but crucial, because the generation born fifty and sixty years ago still living, and able to talk with you, was isolated almost entirely if not hermetically, from the rest of mankind and are, albeit well concealed by superficial wealth, personal or circumstantial to society, shitting ourselves when not freaking out angrily.
Personally I think the freaking out behaviour has been copied by the headless right rather than is actually endemic, but understanding social mimicry in traumatic stress is just another example of how much you have to figure out and filter out, similarly to plotting a course to high professional status just as any independent thinking, and the state of many professions today is that attaining independent thought is a de facto domain expert qualification.
Traumatic mimicry could be easily applied to the reinventing the DBMS from discovery of ACID (early MySQL, 00's; MongoDB, 10's) , the Russian Dolls rewriting of Windows display layers, and potentially almost any project recently enabled by putatively inexpensive compute.
Of course I'm hinting that philosophy and other non technology understanding can make being a generalist both much easier and more pleasurable, but this is a personal journey, find your reasoning where you can but remember that you're a generalist.