GTM complexity became a credential. Was that ever the right outcome?

Google Tag Manager was supposed to free marketers from developer dependencies. Somewhere along the way, mastering it became a career in itself.

I've been in digital marketing for 20 years. The pattern I kept watching: businesses not tracking conversions properly, not because they didn't care, but because the tool assumed a level of technical knowledge most marketers don't have and shouldn't need. CSS selectors breaking after frontend deploys. DataLayer events waiting on developer queues. The Preview Mode loop eating unbillable hours nobody talks about.

The complexity was never the point. Clean conversion data was. But the ecosystem that formed around GTM started treating the complexity as the skill, rather than the outcome it was supposed to produce.

I built TagCompanion to test a thesis: what if the CSS selector was generated automatically using stable identifiers instead of DevTool's fragile DOM paths? What if Ajax listeners, DataLayer events, and eCommerce tracking were all handled by the tool and delivered as a ready-to-import GTM container, no custom code required from the marketer?

Early signs say marketers who can't touch a developer queue are tracking things they never could before.

But I'm curious what this community thinks. Is GTM complexity a genuine skill, or did we collectively mistake a workaround for expertise?