This is significant in an industry where many pilots are apprehensive about hand flying and may have lost the trim response reaction that may have once had, or never did.
The skills available and the skills required must match, a state of the art supersonic fighter requires a thoroughly trained and highly skilled pilot which the operating airforce supplies through careful selection and lengthy instruction. Boeing must have known about the deterioration in flying skills and training levels and should have accounted for this by making the aircraft easier to fly, and building in safety systems like Airbus did with its ECAM and flight envelope protections. Basically, Airbus dumbed down it's entry level product to suit the new generation of pilots who would be flying it whereas Boeing didn't.
The MAX is fundamentally flawed because it took the basic B737 design way past the point where it was supposed to go. It was never meant to have a fuselage of that length or engines of that size. It should have been put to bed with the last 200 series in the 1980s and a clean sheet design produced. Even the 300 series wasn't meant for high bypass engines and had to have the bottom of the cowlings flattened out, the 700 series was an improvement but by that stage the systems should have been brought up to modern standards rather than trying to ride along on the original type certificate. The MAX shouldn't have been produced if it lacked modern safety systems and required MCAS to alleviate an aerodynamic problem.