Or maybe people don't care just about that but instead have a higher ambition in furthering their craft. Be it for joy, some sentiment of "getting better" or whatever. Yeah, sure, most of my days I'm a glorified data converter. I take data in whatever shoddy system and format the customer has it and bang on it long enough so that it fits into our own systems and can be used there.

Does TAOCP help me with that? Well, maybe, mostly no though. I still treasure the parts I've read (I freely admit not having read all of it, but some parts and done some of the exercises) even if from some strict capitalist time = money point of view they probably wouldn't have been worth it.

I think LeetCode is one of the activities where it is worth reading TAOCP, more than for most coders actual jobs.

That's the only answer; SICP and TAOCP are totally useless in an average modern setting. People just copilot glue drivel all day long. You have to be interested in fundamentals and basically write low level stuff (OS/DB/PLD) to really benefit from these things and most, by a large margin, will never touch that stuff.

Edit: for instance, there is now a SIMD article on HN #1; how many people actually are really interested in that? Those should overlap the people who would enjoy these books.