Everyone can build, so everyone is waiting
Talk to anyone building a small software product right now and this pops up quickly. I ran into it on a side project: the app itself can be hacked together in a weekend, but getting access to the Strava API or figuring out whether Garmin will even talk to you can take weeks or months. Google OAuth verification is the same kind of drag.
That's the thing I keep noticing since writing AI development is the new online advertising. Building got cheaper. The rest didn't.
A lot of useful products depend on someone else's platform. Those platforms have review queues, policy checks, partner programs, integration validations, security questionnaires, and sometimes just a person who needs to say yes. Very little of that scales just because code got easier to write. But demand does: everyone can now hack together the thing they want to plug in, so the validation queue gets exponentially longer even though the building part gets shorter.
So I don't think this is the next major moat or some grand new phase. It's more mundane than that. The gate is a waitlist. Or a partner form. Or a "we'll get back to you" from the one API you actually need.
It does change what kind of help matters early, though. The most useful investor or advisor might not be the one with the biggest check. It might be the one who can get you to the right person at the platform you're building around. Not because "network is everything." Just because access can save you a lot of waiting and thus bring you to market quicker.
Code got easier. Getting into the systems people already use is still messy, slow, and weirdly human.