During ZIRP the incentives for employees were completely disconnected from the underlying business, leading to entire careers being built around and rewarded for the wrong outcomes. People have built entire careers while completely missing/ignoring why they're doing the job and how their work is supposed to fit and contribute to the overall business - because in a lot of cases there was never a viable business to begin with, and the founders themselves were playing the "career startup founder" card and enjoying the mismatched incentives set up by a distorted funding market.

Now we're seeing a readjustment as the "free money" is gone and companies realign the incentives to actually make a profit on all that manpower, and are suddenly realizing they either have way too much of it, or ended up with the wrong kind of manpower due to over a decade of mismatched incentives. Thus layoffs and a jobs market flooded with candidates whose skillsets no longer match the current demands.

The good times for the career software engineer - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there's still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career problem solver. Being able to get machines to do your bidding is still a very useful skill to pretty much all business, and what matters now is delivery and solving the business problem in a profitable manner - how many tech buzzwords you have on your resume is no longer relevant.

This isn't to say it's anyone's fault - I don't blame anyone for playing the game and I myself took part in it at one point. But you need to realize it's a game and plan your exit. The danger is that there's an entire generation that started their career in this game and did not realize it was a game at all, and are now caught off-guard.