"But the nature of painting changed."
No it didn't. You can go find wildly talented painters today who work in incredibly realist styles…in fact just a few years ago as visual social media really took off, there were many challenges to "fool" people into thinking they were looking at a photograph when it was actually a painting.
The whole "painters didn't have to paint a realist style anymore because of cameras" is an ad-hoc rationalization. That was entirely due to taste and other cultural factors, nothing really technological about it whatsoever. The only claim you could convincingly make is that painters _who made a living painting portraits for random people who hired them to paint their portrait_ had to pivot because now people could hang a cheaper photograph of themselves and their family on the wall instead of the more expensive painted portrait. That's about it really.
Handcoding great software for people who want it is alive and well. It's just not at all the industry "software engineers" who can't see past what Google or Meta like to shove out of their corporate offices have been working in from the jump.