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That seems much more like an epicycle than anything I've suggested--your article shows 29% as a low point in the assertion "most people can be trusted," around 2014, but then suggests a rise to 34% in 2018--and then a flat line to 34% again in 2024. This, against a trend of clear decline since the 1970s, with no sign of a recent upward trend in sight--at best, it's flat (and still historically low) despite slight recovery from a local minimum. Your "upswing for the past ten years" seems like an exaggeration at best--and probably just tendentious. I have a variety of other concerns about this particular measure of social trust, which I suppose you would also call epicycles, but I'm not sure it matters, as it's not entirely clear to me what you're trying to actually say.
If your point is something like "actually this 'vibecession' stuff is super complicated and certainly not attributable to a single influence" then, I mean, sure? I'm sure most people wouldn't even get through Scott's whole writeup before saying "it's getting to be a little much at this point." Sociological inquiry is often like that. I don't even think it would be wrong to say, as you did, "only high mortgage rates and a frozen housing market remain as plausible explanations of 'wtf happened in 2020.'" But those things still happened against a background of longer-term social developments that hadn't happened before. Mortgage rate and housing market problems aren't particularly novel. The slow but increasingly unmistakable unraveling of the American social fabric definitely is, and we're reaching levels of animosity I don't think we've really seen since the Civil War. I'd be much more persuaded if you tried to boil the whole conversation down to smartphones or social media, than to housing and mortgage rates. Or COVID, for that matter. But I think stuff like COVID and markets are things that shock our social system, at various times; they don't explain what happens in response to that shock. A different society would, presumably, have responded differently. That sort of thing seems, to me, worth thinking about.
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