I worked for (and my wife still works for) a small company that provided a boutique set of engineering services. They had a non compete that was very narrowly tailored and called out by name the competitors that you couldn’t go work for directly (6 months or a year), all of which were also small companies.

That sort of non-compete that seems reasonable to me- very specific, time limited, and only for people with actual trade knowledge.

A good test is the number of openings a prohibition covers. The non-compete I signed covered maybe 30 openings nationwide in a good year, and zero in my local metro area.