One of my mentor at my company got redundant exactly a year ago. He is still looking for the next role. I really feel bad.
One sysadmin I worked with ended up as a taxi driver. A core network engineer eventually retrained as a school lab technician. Two devs both spent a decade doing tech support at a call centre before bouncing out of tech altogether.
Things started picking up again around 2005-6, but for a couple of years there was nothing. Much, much worse than the Great Financial Crisis or anything that's happened since.
It eventually translated into a very good end of career job but a lot of people ended up in "would you like fries with that?" positions. I had luck but it was by no means guaranteed.
Certainly, in my case, lucky as I was, it wasn't until my next job that I was really making "good" compensation a decade or so later.
There was a period when the $200K-$300K job was a given for many in development. Easy for that to vanish in a puff.