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I've noticed the same change and it really has been bothering me. I've been doing 3D art for over a decade not counting art school and in that time I've watched my talents grow tenfold but my client pool and revenue stream hasn't improved with me, if anything it's gotten worse. I feel like I spent so much time refining my skills when there's basically a giant gap between the amateur bullshit indie projects with unliveably shit pay and buffoonish expectations that will never get off the ground and the salaried AA/AAA jobs with fair pay that you won't get because the whole industry is competing for a small list of companies that are currently downsizing globally. There is no middle ground, and it really feel like there are no indie studios or small boutique agencies anymore with reasonable pay that know what the fuck they're doing. 

And that's kinda bullshit, but it really is an investment and structural issue more than it is about Unreal Engine or something which is kinda a weird take. I get what you're trying to say, and one of the reasons I really hate Blender is that its aggressively mediocre community makes it damn near impossible to find answers on how to do anything--small, mundane tasks that any pro does every day, because yes the barrier to entry is lower than paid software and that dilutes the talent pool with a bunch of amateurs, and with the Blender community in particular those amateurs decide to be gatekeepers too. But that hasn't stopped some insanely talented people from doing some incredibly impressive stuff with it, and it doesn't really take away the jobs that would otherwise require blender or any other program for that matter. The only affect it has on supply and demand is that there is a much larger supply of much lower quality talent. And I wouldn't even say that Unreal Engine has the same problem, if anything its potential for virtual production and architectural visualization should be creating jobs. 

Honestly, the real issue, or I guess a big part of it since these things can rarely be traced back to just one reason, is AI. People think that AI is going to steal their jobs because it is so good it is going to replace their labor outright, but honestly AI sucks at that. AI is destroying jobs that way, but only insofar as it's being forced by ham-fisted execs or venture capitalists who end up tanking their companies or startups in the process and there's no more jobs left because there is no more company left to work for. But most of that already died out at the beginning of the hype cycle as the first casualties of economic darwinism, the REAL reason AI is killing jobs is because its killing any kind of real investment in anything but it. Companies, conglomerates, VCs, private equity, etc. They all got limited funds in their war chest and right now 110% of those funds are earmarked for AI investment. They can't fund new games, or studios, or movies, or exciting projects to work on, because everyone put all their eggs in the AI basket and now there's nothing left for omelettes. Its a black hole for money and wealth, and its incredibly stupid and irresponsible, but Benn Jordan recently did a great video on it suggesting they might not be blindly backing themselves into debt and that the debt itself may be the actual point of some larger leverage scheme to manipulate the world economy. I'm not saying I buy this conspiracy theory 100% but he did make a point that I can't really refute which is that when you have wealth larger than most economies, it makes a sick kind of sense that you make a bigger drop in the bucket of financial leverage by destroying the wealth in those remaining economies than you do trying to increase your profit margins by 1% year over year.

At any rate, malicious or just plain stupid, there ain't a lot of wealth floating around anymore that would otherwise be apportioned into exciting projects. Can hardly blame a software for that.