How many times have you created a framework in the last 20 years?
How many tools have you changed for your team/organization in the last 20 years?
How many SDET or Test ARchitech are required in our organization or for 100 testers?
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What’s your concern here?
Do you want to head into an SDET or Test Architect role?
Or are you upset of why the demands are what they are from certain companies?
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Who is making the expection of automation testers becoming SDET or Test Architects?
I see 
a lot of assumptions here.
I’ll answer the next questions with the last 15 years since I haven’t professionally worked 20 years yet 
0, there are already many out there, there is absolutely no need for another one.
Define changed? But no I haven’t many any changes to frameworks because it’s not needed.
We don’t even use those terms and what do they even do? Are they just test managers?
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I don’t have experience of 20 years, not even 5 years so I’m not sure if my answer is relevant but I want to know when you say framework, do you mean framework like pytest, TestNG, Behave, Cucumber, Mocha, etc. or do you mean projects based on this framework. I have worked on later i.e. developed an automation framework for a self-project as well as I have worked on some of the automation framework projects for my organization from scratch.
Not sure because every day, every week, and more precisely every month we come across new tools, some tools we just do POC and discard, while with some we continue as long it is relevant. Selenium, appium, katalon, chrome deve tools, BrowserStack, firebase, testflight, twilio, mailosaur, protonmail, lighthouse, GT matrix, JMeter, Jenkins, docker, cmd, etc…
That depends on demand but I think there is a difference between SDET and test architect. In the market obviously, many companies have diluted the difference between these roles with their job-name but still becoming a test architect is not so easy.
Architecture is the backbone of either development or automation projects and the person working as an architect should have deep knowledge of tech-stack, whereas in most of the SDETs are assigned the task of script writing, PR review of peer, etc.
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Those sound like metrics/objectives/goals related questions than actual questions gauging whether one is proficient as an SDET or test architect. Or questions assessing whether candidate wants to be an SDET or test architect.
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When it comes to automation I’d sort of put myself into a sort of grinder group, I can knock scripts out at a very average pace, AI helps quite a bit to maintain that average.
It has never though been my primary focus area or highest value skill, I’m primarily a tester. but have coding and automation skills. I do know good architecture practices from my coding days but I still need help on occasion getting those in place.
My own experience in hiring and recruitment I tend to see a lot of “automators” in this similar group as my tertiary level skills. I do though have expectations for those who put automation as their primary skill and role to be at a higher level than this.
This I think is part of it, there are a lot of tester and other roles who are reasonably okay maybe even good automators so they do expect those who focus on this to be at that higher level, they could do it themselves otherwise.
The expectation is not just from grinder to architect but also from UI to full stack, from one tool to any tool, from one language to many.
The expectations may seem high, particularly from a grinder but I also get expected to be judged similarly from my own primary skill testing, if anyone can do what I do why hire me, expectations of my primary skill are quite rightly higher,
Low code automation adds to this, what technical skills do you learn, how do you develop those skills further and stand out from the crowd when they advertise anyone can do it?
There may be an answer to this so please share if you feel strongly about low code automation being a career path as I am genuinely interested.
I like to have access to architect level as should all teams, I’ve seen the horror of some automation solutions from testers over the years, the long e2e single script, no re-use of code, no modularisation, weakest link/test whole failures, least optimal layer in stack etc and managers accepting it as the norm as nobody there to know otherwise.
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I began testing 1989, Telecom systems in the technology of the time (mostly CLI’s and different kind of simulations). After a year I became test leader and a year after that I became manager for testers. I worked with test for 7 ys then went on doing other things, came back to test 5 ys ago (To finish my career doing whats funny instead of making a lot of money, troubleshooting test systems)
I have never really been an “architect” but I had the responsibility to make test work(Also in roles in the boring years) which meant I had to oversee what “architects” did. This was not a very ordered activity. There were strong opinions among the more experienced and cocky tester on whether to test like this or that. And I was involved in making some test platforms being introduced.
But nothing as funny as (not being a guy who’s boats gets rocked by programming) to do various automations using ChatGPT, both UI testing and API testing.
Now, to answer your question in the title:
An architect should be passionate over test methods and test frameworks. Thats the most important thing. You really need to be dedicated, because you’ll get a lot of whining from everywhere, individualists, managers whatever.
You need to be able to lead, to present, to coach and do tradeoffs. You need some managerial qualities.
You obviously need to be adequatly technically skilled in the test area and what technology is used in the framework to be used.
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Apparently there’s an affectation related to showcasing one’s portfolio with several git repos that include a test automation framework too. I’ve only heard about this and never done it but from a bit of research it seems, whatever I’m doing in Playwright right now:
- helper functions
- page object classes
- report generation
- CI/CD pipeline integration
- etc
all of this constitutes to a framework?
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In Belgium that’s not really a thing here 
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What does apparently mean? Have you or someone close to you that you know encounter this in job applications in the recent years as a criteria/advantage?
Playwright is a framework.
Your structure built on Playwright, can also be defined as a framework.
Did a quick search and this came up:
I myself haven’t encountered anything like this but I get the sense it might be a thing in some places.
That’s correct.