Because they're being starved by their clients.

Call it "kid with a CC subscription" syndrome: If an accomplished designer with mad skillz wants $1000 to give you a simple site with a unique UI and look, she's bending over backwards to give you a deal. If a kid with a CC subscription wants $200 to give you a WordPress template, she's earning more money than she ever has before.

The Java/HTML5 dustup didn't help matters. All the creative guys who had crawled their way to the top over the past ten years were fluent in Flash. iOS doesn't speak Flash, it speaks HTML5. So now if you want to do something interesting, you have to relearn how to do it in HTML5. Take that accomplished designer with mad skillz - she might be the world's best open-pit cook. All of a sudden she's gotta do a banquet sous vide. Meanwhile the kid with CC just learned this shit nine months ago, it's all fresh and new, and they never even bothered with Flash. Probably don't even know what the name "Macromedia" meant. So from a technical acuity/tool experience standpoint, the mad skillz designer and the kid with CC are on a level playing field.

Finally, understand that everyone client side is mostly concerned with keeping their job. If they can point at their website and say "it should have worked, it looks just like Apple's and look at their metrics" they will survive the post-mortem. If they instead have to say "well, I took a risk on Ms. Mad Skillz and she did win a Clio, so there's that" they're out the door.

This video is now eight years old. By the time I saw it I hadn't done any ad work for four years. Nonethless, see if it strikes you as familiar: