How people think wizards would talk:
Behold! I have unfurled powers beyond mortal comprehension!
How wizards would actually talk:
If I hear, “why don’t you just channel the infernal essence through an ephemeral plane?” one more goddamn time from someone who hasn’t actually read the fucking rune diagrams, I’m going to lose my shit.
In other words, wizards do exist, they are just called IT specialists.
They would 100% be trying to peddle ape runes inscribed with XP cost (for extra permanency) as the next big investment opportunity
The ape is merely a representational avatar! The true value of the rune lies in possessing it, for it identifies you as a member of an elite cadre of ape rune possessors.
Or giant megacorporations each hire 200,000+ of them to create products for the non-magic folk to consume.
After a few decades, the idea of being a wizard is synonymous with working 8+ hours a day on magic that no wizard really wants and there is so little new spells and magic being created in the world that everyone wishes there wasn't any.
Then leaks come out that the products these megacorporations create have been slowly killing the planet and they've known for decades. But since they have so much power and money, nothing can stop them until the world dies.
I spend 8 hours a day gluing together spells my company purchased from a proprietary caster’s book to serve increasingly arcane (no pun intended) business needs. In my free time, I like to read about the latest advancements in corporate spellcraft, but most of the new spells are either patches of old spells or new spells that fix problems created by popular spells of the past 5 years. These new spells inevitably introduce new problems that will be “solved” in another 5 years.
That's literally Megumin from KonoSuba lol. She's supposed to be one of the strongest wizards around, but refuses to learn anything other than explosion magic. Explosion magic is basically useless in most situations, as it just flattens a huge area.
Oh great wizards finasteride and dutasteride, give me back my hair!
Imagine thinking that PhD's and postdocs aren't exploited by capitalism.
That one kind of magic would be capitalism. I mean the situation from OP post is the current state of liberal economics.
So they'd be like cobol developers? From what I know that is basically magic to keep it running
