AEM 6.5 is dying a slow but inevitable death, AEM as a Cloud Service will be around for many years to come but is not where Adobe is putting emphasis. Adobe sees the future of AEM as Edge Delivery Services (see aem.live) and Universal Editor (experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/e… which actually shows that Adobe is trying to reach parity with AEM Classic). They believe that customizations should migrate to Adobe Developer App Builder.
Posts in r-aem category
It’s worth learning because it will be in the market for the next decade, but Adobe believes Edge Delivery Services is the future of AEM and has actively started building that out and migrating customers to it. EDS with Universal Editor still expects AEM for content persistence so expertise is important in the foreseeable future even as they sunset it.
The virtue of learning AEM is that it, in essence, is an Ingres to more modern headless development by way of SPAs, Universal Editor, and even EDS which is analogous to gitflow-driven static site generation while still giving you enough pain and frustration to teach you about traditional monolith development.