It seems to become less of a requirement, especially if you are working for small or medium businesses, whoms budget normally allows them to "buy premium theme, get some guy to build my website with it"

Which is a shame because using those themes can be a right pain sometimes, and often if the client wants a specific functionality then you'll need to install a plugin which might be incompatible and you'll quickly end up with a bloated, house of card of a website.

i still do. i build all of my personal/freelance themes from scratch… i work for a corporation that still requires a lot of full stack work, as well.

i like doing things barebones and from scratch so that i know exactly where things go wrong, if and when they do. i usually don’t need a ton of plugins to achieve specific things, and i don’t want to deal w premium themes. they’re a waste of my time.

Depends on what sort of work you do. Full stack WP developers write code, esp if they build plugins or themes. Wordpress “designers” might only write CSS and maybe a little JS.

For any form of programming you will need to look stuff up until it’s second nature. I’m betting you still need to look up obscure JS functions from time to time - I know I still do, even after over 20 years.