Public transport won't substitute the need or desire for private cars. Improving public transport's impact will plateau at some point because people will always value the privacy and benefits of using their own private car.
You will never be able to create transport system where people take a bus in front of their door step, to the grocery store and back on demand.
If you are watching any sort of financial YouTube videos, you'd probably notice the amount of fake bot conversations in the comments section, usually trying to promote scam services.
It scares me that in few year I wouldn't be able to tell if something is fake or not most of the time and global mind set will be controlled by even more fake content.
We may need to figure out a way to identify genuine human-generated content.
That's why you have levels. Entry level software engineer/data scientist is still software engineer/data scientist. People have to start from somewhere.
Plus let me tell you that - not everyone wants to excel in a field some people may just want to do just enough. Not everyone is dreaming of mighty promotions and titles. And that's should be fine too. If you don't want such people - fix your interview/performance processes.