It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want.
I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more generalist skillset is probably the best way to succeed in this new era; I'm just pointing out that LLMs don't really own any part of the stack so thoroughly that specialists in that segment will just go away.
[0] https://research.google/pubs/the-role-of-visual-complexity-a...
As far as frontend vs backend, there’s a greater scope for fuckups when dealing with the backend. Frontend problems tend to be more transient. So the stakes are lower, which means that the accountability of humans has less value.
Idk, I like AI when it works, but it drives me insane when it keeps making errors. I've had a few errors which I figured out from documentation fairly quickly, provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.
Every engineer can now produce things in the front end that doesn't look like complete and utter garbage, sure, but everyone is also producing the new-era of Twitter Bootstrap pages. It all has the same touched-by-AI look and it might as well be customer kryptonite from everything I've experienced at my workplace with customer surveys and collaboration. It has raised the floor substantially for internal tools and admin pages though.