On the other hand, there is something I learned from permaculture design. You need to allow what you want to grow in the ecosystem if you want them present. If I wanted to develop the next generation of developers, then I'd be giving that CRUD stuff I've done many times to a junior developer instead. It obviously depends on funding, and whether your investors are on board with that.

As far as keeping up and remaining competitive ... my suggestion is to learn these things in a way where you can broadly apply the underlying principles in other domains, especially that, as you age, your working memory will shrink. This isn't accumulating more of the same thing, but gaining deeper insights that can only be found when you've developed a sufficient level of skill. There are lots of ways this can be accomplished.

If you can attach a valid business reason/excuse then it's fairly easy to get time dedicated to experimentation and learning.

I haven't been a coder for several years now, but I still try to justify a personal lab environment in order to understand the market and customer problems.

If you're an Engineer or EM, I think it would be even easier (attach experimentation to some sort of critical engineering initiative).

Even with Code Gen Copilots becoming a thing, between the lines most of us in engineering and business leadership recognize it cannot replace architecture or design. If it can, then you've solved the Turing or Chinese Room problem and that's a whole other story.

That said, if your day job isn't only "write this terraform/python script" you shouldn't be at risk.