What I'm getting at is that A. isn't really a problem at all - if one doesn't have the marketable skills to "win" a job then pointing at any one issue (age, in this case) is simply coping / self-serving, because what I meant by turnabout is that "do unto others" is a principle that the world doesn't run on and thinking otherwise is naive whether 25 or 65.

It is completely discriminatory in B. when the only people who could possibly meet those inflated expectations can not logically be under the age of 30. I've seen this far too often to dismiss it as occasional - it is/was systemic.

It's the burden of the accuser to claim they were discriminated against because of age, and as we can see, there's no qualms with making lots and lots of articles and "think-pieces" out of the hypothesis. Sometimes "older" workers have unreasonably inflated senses of skills and/or worth, and can't take the ego blow, so, off to coping (see A) above.

Haha thanks for the armchair therapy with D., it's worth every penny from your barely 30 perspective.