Fully agree.

The article says "The days of the battle for talent are over."

but as a consultant I keep getting project requests by companies who couldn't find enough employees and are now willing to pay a premium for outside help that may enable then to still keep their deadlines.

I guess it really must depend a lot on where you are then, because in my experience of my corner of Europe, lots of companies have had significant layoffs, jobs hunting is getting harder and raises have not at all kept of with inflation.

There are major strikes in Germany about Quality of Life issues right now. I think France might be having strikes too now, but I haven't investigated the one clip I saw.

I do not buy that cause in Central Europe there’s a lot of tech companies offices closing or exiting, and the whole scene of startups and scale ups are not so dynamic as USA and if you go to pitchbook/Crunchbase you will see tons of “startups from 2011” with overhead/org bloat with last round in 2020/21.

If I was employed in some company in Central Europe, I would not bet my livelihood in any kind of job stability that is sold in the region by work council or regulations that can be easily hoped.