When you say the compensation was very close to the current market rate, I assume you mean the market rate in Poland, correct? No fancy Silicon Valley salaries for devs in Poland, that is.
Exactly, that is my personal feeling as well. I'd rather prefer to spend the extra time understanding the solution instead of just copy-pasting and adapting the first Stack Overflow answer.
In fact, one of the most striking things I encountered in Github issues, Stack Overflow, etc... is the amount of people who simply try something, works for them and they share it like some sacred solution, but when asked why that works, they shrug and cannot provide an answer. And there is a sea of validated answers just like that in those platforms.
My fear is that we are slowly rolling down a hill in which IT ultimately becomes less of an empirical industry and everything comes down to trying until it works (without the proper understanding), because it is magic.
Yes, sometimes (if not most of the time) developers are in a rush and have no extra time to spend on understanding a solution, so it is much better to slam a copy-pasted code and move on. Still, this should not be the way to go...
I do feel like you, and think mankind is doomed for real in the short term. But then I enjoy a period of disconnection from news, social media, the Internet in general...and that feeling is mostly gone, while finding joy in other activities.
These are times filled with daily overflowing streams of varied information that can leave us hopeless and disillusioned. Cutting that off to some extent can help, without leading to a total disconnect.
Holy molly! This sounds similar to what I thought a couple of days ago: China is the major electronics supplier to most technological companies, what if China added some sort of sniffing or malware on the chips to spy on their customers?