In my opinion at least in the US, the earning side is expanding faster than the redemption side is being devalued. Also, most of the people on this forum skew older but I can tell you I'm 33 and most of my friends are in their 20s and 30s, we mostly have online businesses, some are freelancers, others work for small companies that have remote teams, and even those with traditional "corporate" jobs are now being provided more independence to work from wherever, so its not hard to take one of the 2 or 3 "saver" dates available on a given month. The idea that only retirees or those taking time off their career have travel flexibility is really outdated. Even the term "working from home" has become outdated, as the vast majority of location independent knowledge workers would prefer to work from a coworking space or coffee shop most days as to not go insane from being home alone 24/7.

Now if you are a family looking for 4 roundtrip tickets in J for a specific date to go from a specific city to another specific city across the atlantic or pacific at the "saver" rate, yeah probably not as easy as it was 10-20 years ago I presume, but then again, 10-20 years ago airline programs were made to reward frequent fliers not to make money off transfers from credit cards, so they didn't really care if they would lose a little money because not so many people were booking as points were harder to come by as you could really only get them from flying.