This makes me sad. When O'Reilly and SD West still held their conferences, you could easily leapfrog your knowledge of a newer language (such as go or -- way back in the day -- Java) to a much higher level. Cons in the latter half the 2000s were some of the first places where you could see someone demonstrate an entire AJAX code solution, which eventually morphed into the backbone of what became the Web 2.0 revolution ('revolution' at least from a career-growth standpiont, whatever one may think of the movement). I learned c++ from Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, and Scott Myers at these Cons. Pre-pandemic, I definitely got professional value from technical sessions at GDC.
I'm sure this is a coincidence, but it seems to me that once shops tipped toward glue-jobs of Dockerfiles with declarative serverless cloud templates, a lot more of the online and talk content emphasised "what to" (commodity) instead of "how to" (craftsmanship).