Accelerating notice is not always indication that your employer doesn't find you valuable, I almost always prefer to do that, especially with highly productive people: once an employee knows they are leaving and has announced it, anything they do other than tie up loose ends is more liability than benefit, and good people will do more. But their head is not 100% in it, they don't expect to have to maintain what they build, and most importantly they won't be around to ask questions of if things go wrong later, so it's almost always better to get them out the door ASAP.

I have left _alot_ of jobs.

Never once were exit activities well-considered and useful.

sometimes I think most management failures are because they are acting like they are supposed to and not how they should

> My employer agreed I was useless and decided to turn that into 9 days notice.

Did they say you were useless and changed the notice to 9 days, or are you inferring the former from the latter?

Inference. My direct supervisor tried very hard to keep me but the CTO could not be convinced.

The CTO shouldn’t even be involved in that conversation imo. If I was your supervisor I would told the CTO about 3 weeks into your 5 weeks and off-boarded you with other engineers if needed.