The word soft did most of the damage. It implied optional, unmeasurable, and secondary to the real technical work, which made it easy to leave out of hiring, development and promotion.
That framing is now expensive, because the technical production it was contrasted with is the half that got automated.
The distinction was never about difficulty
Hard skills were the ones easy to certify. You could examine them, put them on a CV and verify them cheaply. Soft skills were the ones hard to certify, so they got the dismissive name.
Nobody ever claimed leading a team through a bad quarter was easier than writing a query. It was just harder to put on a form, so the vocabulary treated it as lesser and organisations followed the vocabulary.
Why they became load-bearing
When production was the bottleneck, the technical skill was the constraint and everything else was a nice addition. Remove the bottleneck and the constraint moves to whatever is next, which turns out to be all of it.
- Deciding what to build, because building is no longer the expensive part and building the wrong thing is now faster.
- Explaining a conclusion to somebody who does not want it, because generated evidence does not make that conversation easier and often makes it harder.
- Judging quality, because the surface quality of everything went up and stopped being informative.
- Handling disagreement, because more work being produced faster means more collisions, sooner.
- Developing other people, which is now the only reliable way judgement gets built.
They are more testable than the label suggests
The claim that these cannot be assessed is mostly an artefact of never trying. Each one has an observable behaviour behind it.
- Judgement: ask what would change their mind about a position they hold. A specific answer is the signal; a vague one is the absence of it.
- Communication: ask them to explain something complex from their field to somebody outside it. Comprehension is the measure, not eloquence.
- Handling disagreement: ask about the last time they changed their mind at work and what caused it. People who cannot recall one are telling you something.
- Developing others: ask who they have made better and how they know. Specifics or nothing.
What this changes
If these are the constraint, they belong where the constraint belongs: in hiring criteria, in development plans, and in promotion decisions, assessed as seriously as the technical requirements they used to sit beneath.
The organisations that keep treating them as a personality bonus will keep promoting the most productive person on the team and then wondering why the team keeps building things nobody wanted.