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There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now, ranging from inconvenient to life altering. The things I've been hearing about from my social circle include major tech layoffs, inflation, and increased serious illness due to diseases like RSV and flu hitting people in unexpectedly strong ways. My general response to this has been, "well maybe next time, we shouldn't shut down the entire world due to a relatively non-dangerous disease like coronavirus." Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take? To be honest, there's probably a lot of other factors at play as well that I'm not accounting for in that analysis, due to my unfamiliarity. These factors may include foreign issues, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, leading to increased energy prices, etc.
I think you're taking a really narrow view of the average tech worker. Most software engineers don't work for the silicon valley companies and I haven't actually noticed this supposed tech job apocalypse. My department and the departments of all the tech workers in my social circle seem to be expanding. My job is not speculative, I create software that directly and immediately helps my coworkers make the company more money. I think this is actually probably true for the vast majority of tech workers. You just hear more from these big speculative projects than the guy making boring loan management software. And with many people still having trouble navigating an email client and the next generation broadly not understanding file systems at all us well compensated midwit software engineers aren't goin anywhere.
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