[taklimakan]

This unfortunately resonates with my experience. I used to attend GoLab, the event held in Florence, Italy.

Over time, as the event gained in popularity, speakers shifted from developers to developer advocates.

Last time I attended (2023 edition, IIRC) one of the talks was from some Intellij dev-relations person: the talk was about the importance of unit testing or something like that, completely devoid of any value for anyone who hasn’t started coding yesterday. The speaker was obviously not a technical person and gave a strong impression they were presenting content they barely knew anything about. I seriously doubt the slides deck was put together the night before. It was an utter disappointment. That was it for me. That’s a glaring example of what the OP is talking about but other talks I had listened to were only marginally better or on par with that one. That’s when I decided the thing was so much not worth the (hefty) ticket price + cost of transportation + accommodation.

It’s a sad state of affairs but not unexpected.