Replace "software engineer" with "person building a product" in that first quote.
The value of engineering skills as they are defined today is falling, but the value of a single person with an idea and the drive to implement it is soaring.
Back when I was a physicists every two bit crank used to go on about how ideas were more important than knowledge.
Now I'm hearing the same in programming. And it's just as wrong here. Picking the right algorithm and stack means the difference between a website that can handle 2,000 people and one that can handle 2,000,000. How many websites start off with a bad idea, get popular and then need to hire hundreds of engineers to put ban aid after band aid on a fundamentally terrible idea?
Facebook and google have both had to spend millions of man hours to fix the fact they were optimized for millions of users and billions of web pages and now have to deal with x1000 times those. And the only reason why they were that prepared in the first place was because extraordinary people wrote them. The average developer who bangs out a half thought out colour by numbers website would be lucky to have it not crash before it reaches a thousand users a day.
On the flip-side, the scalability doesn't matter if no one comes. The efficiency of the implementation doesn't matter if the wrong idea is implemented.
Sometimes skimping on the engineering is better than skimping on the idea. That's what MVP and quick-to-market are about, correcting the idea so you can architect a solution to the RIGHT problem.
The value of engineering skills as they are defined today is falling, but the value of a single person with an idea and the drive to implement it is soaring.