The golden age is over. It’s a saddening experience watching something you care about, and your opportunities to build a career and life around it, fade away. The reasons for this are numerous, (like you mentioned; ZIRP, COVID, etc) but the ultimate irony IMO was the layoffs/AI push being an industry-driven nail in the industry’s own coffin.
There’s also something to be said about the industry’s faltering after the social era, a period which largely began the degradation of Big Tech’s public image, which was worsened even more by the overcorrection into Crypto/Web3, and finally through AI - which feels just as forced as the previous era was.