I'm guessing you are American and under 35 because there's a whole generation of you that considers an 13-year tech bull run with massive stock appreciation as normal, and the hardest problem is passing leetcode interviews. It's a very different story looking for a job in a real downturn like 2000 or 2008.

If you keep looking for the same job as you get older, yes. I'm well above your age guess and starting a new job soon, but it's definitely not the same role or expectations as 20 years ago. I've found that if you work to differentiate yourself as an individual the substitution cost is very high, so you can find work even in the most challenging environments. I think this would be a much harder strategy in a heavily unionized environment.

Something to consider is pension lock. Your pension is tied to a specific employer, and leaving means losing everything. I hear this all the time from school teachers, but it also happened to my mom: Budget cuts were coming and while she had enough seniority to stay employed, she didn’t have enough juice for choice of location. She was going to have to accept a job that required an additional hour of commute that she couldn’t do for health reasons. So she had to leave 2 years shy of a pension. She got nothing, and she also doesn’t qualify for Social Security.

Thankfully we don't tend to get those scam pension traps in tech, instead we get 401k's which are your own money.