Veterans are usually associated with wars and casualties, but they are not the only ones. Older professional people are often called veterans as well, as they have a lot of knowledge about the inner workings of technology that the youth of today either no longer use, or are only using as everyday things. Not all people need to be on the cutting edge of technology, as there are plenty of activities that require older knowledge.
I myself may use newfangled technology like ChatGPT, but I use it to help me build a software platform that will enable a new kind of ultra-secure truth-tied computing tasks to be executed. I call it Spheres, to contrast it with Qubes OS, which may be secure, but which is built upon way more complex components, which makes it harder to dig through if you wish to know what it does.