There has been some real fertilizer offered up here by two posters.
Pocketshaver, Photoshop is just a tool. I think perhaps you should be reminded of the amount of image manipulation and composite images which were done in the period 1870 to 1890. I used the word "reminded" because I am somewhat certain you are unaware of the history of what predated the type of dry,representational,straight photography that you apparently seem to idolize. I would suggest that you get a copy of Beaumont Newhall's book , The History of Photography, and learn for yourself about theperiod That lasted roughly 35 years in which photographers were typically interested in allegorical storytelling photos, most often made from two or three negatives combined into one final picture , and also you should look at what was known as pictorialism as opposed to the f64 post World War II ideal that you seem to idolize so much.
As far as making prints, most people who were serious about their Photography in the 1960s shot slide film, and very few of those pictures were actually printed, but were instead collected in archives which basically sat in the dark, save for the occasional long and boring slideshow once or twice per year. Making prints or not making prints has absolutely nothing to do with sincerity or in degree of commitment to Imaging. Prints are fine, but they cannot be sent worldwide to multiple outlets without great cost. We now have a way to share and disseminate photos that involves no print, and it is not all about " immediate gratification"as much as it is a reflection of where we are in time in history. We no longer look at woodcuts from famous battles, but we see immediate photographic evidence of what a battle really looks like within seconds or minutes or hours because we no longer live in 1755 or 1865, but because we live in 2019. I am not typing this, but am instead doing speech to text on my Samsung Android phone. Would my words have greater validity if I were to write them with a quill pen on parchment and send them via Pony Express to some office in New York where the words would then be printed with linotype? Equating the method of delivery with the sincerity or conviction of the artist is a Fool's errand, and it's in my opinion " lazy thinking". There has been a tendency to pejoratively dismiss all sorts of things about the modern world with a desire for "immediate gratification", and this has been going on for more than 50 years . We used to have to write letters to communicate with people far away, but then we were able to call them on the telephone, and now we can text or email them. Does this mean that the feelings we express in an email are somehow less sincere than feelings which were expressed in a handwritten letter 100 years ago?
Back to the urgent question, is photography as we know it dying? Well, that depends on what photography you know. Is photography the same today as it was in 1985? No it is not Instead of crappy 4 by 6 inch color prints shot on Kodacolor Gold 200, we now shoot on color positive digital single-lens cameras with 24 to 50 megapixel resolution. Equipment is better. Prints are relatively less expensive. It no longer costs $0.50 per image. We can now make unlimited copies of an image with absolutely no quality loss. We can share one single photo with the world for free, or nearly so. It used to cost 19 to as much as $0.59 to make one small color print which had to be shown to one person at a time,but now we can snap a photo, and upload it to a website and it can be seen around the world within a minute or two. But just because our work can be seen quickly that has got nothing to do with intent or with quality or with degree of commitment to image-making. This is 2019, not 1929, not 1959, and not 1989. The past is what it was, and some serious intellectual honesty is required, and a lot less knee-jerk finger-pointing is in order.
If we were to ask the question, " is medicine as we know it changing?" the answer would surely be, "I sure as hell hope so!"
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