Youre right about quality but the problem isn't just code quality, its also the sheer volume of code and its unmaintainability. Quality has always been pretty low in commercial software, but there were practical limits to how much of it could be created, and with enough labor thrown at testing and maintenance, as you say it clanked on.

When it's easier to just generate a whole new page in the UI than fix bugs or make usability improvements though, when it's easier to generate a whole new separate app than to introduce a new feature into the existing one, and when completely nontechnical people are running around doing this stuff without understanding the consequences, risks, etc. I think its very fair to describe it as a dark age. Large parts of the industry and the world are already there in the thick of it, and it is bad.

Social structures will adapt but that won't bring back the old way of doing things or reduce reliance on AI, if anything it will entrench it further, until/unless costs become prohibitive