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I think this analysis is interesting but fundamentally off the mark. "Jocks" and "nerds" aren't real, except in a descriptive sense. They're polyphyletic groups. There are jock and nerd behaviors, by which we assign the labels, but no jock or nerd etiology. There are multiple causes that might cause a person to externally present as either, and no cause common to either party. It may or may not be correct to say that kids nowadays want to be more like nerds, but trying to attribute deep social changes to that is fundamentally futile. Even if it's true, these kids don't want to be more anxious, or more socially awkward, or pastier-- they just want the positive attributes associated with nerdity... intelligence, education, high-paying jobs. But they aren't copying the monomaniacal focus on studying that creates the "true" nerds and their social problems.
Now, I think you're onto something about the impact of 2008-- but you're missing the root cause. It wasn't the GFC, it was facebook, youtube, and the iphone. Modern kids don't idolize tech founders, they idolize influencers! (Streamers, youtubers, social media stars, etc.) Think about the dynamics of that. From their own perspective, an influencer is just a person-- they're constantly concerned with social approval, and constantly afraid of failing. But from the perspective of an impressionable media-consumer, every influencer is constantly succeeding, because failing or quitting just means means they're seamlessly replaced with another aspirational influencer selling the same vision of success. So the narrative they're fed is: all the most successful people in the world are hyper-vigilant about social consequences and also glued at all times to the drama-and-suffering machines we all have in our pockets.
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