> Wasn't writing code always cheap?

No.

If you’re a startup that wanted to ship your product, you were stuck hiring developers and waiting 6 months. I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months).

Creating a v1 of a product / feature is now cheap. When you’re a mature product and need to make complicated / iterative decisions - that’s not cheap and requires expertise to make good decisions.