>If you look at the linked “functional unemployment” chart (https://www.lisep.org/tru) the numbers in the past three years are the lowest on record. It has been on a consistent downward trajectory, minus 2008 crash plus COVID, so that does not seem worth highlighting.

Agreed. It's dishonest to take one headline metric (ie. U3 unemployment), redefine it to mean something entirely different (ie. U6 unemployment or whatever), and then conclude things are much worse than initially thought because the redefined metric is much worse than the original

Suppose that there was a "sickness" metric that measured how many people are in hospital. Then someone comes along and claims the country is much sicker than people thought, citing a "functional sickness" metric that measured anyone who called in sick, and that's "horrifying". They'd be laughed out of the room.