I agree that there are similarities, but many of the web businesses these days are legit with happy customers. The challenge seems to be more widespread across the economy and there are a few not-so-black-swan-anymore looking things on the horizon (e.g., a Sino war) that could dramatically change the picture for the whole industry.

My take away is that we may have a mild recession, but the likelihood of a massive recession is a lot higher than it has been in decades.

I have a hard time imagining the analog of Nortel or Lucent today. They simply vanished.

It's not hard to imagine Lyft and/or Uber vanishing. Paraphrasing Buffet: The easy-money tide is going out and we're going to find out who's been swimming naked.

Wework, various lending and fin-tech companies (e.g. Better), Crypto companies.

Then imagine this: War over Taiwan. One way or another all the fabs get incinerated.

Which companies go bankrupt now?

Exactly. One of the central features of the dot-com bubble were that stupid (as in never-gonna-work / Silicon Valley-the-series) companies were getting massive amounts of funding.

Then, it was because {value} = {idea} + {Internet}.

Except nobody knew how much value the {Internet} part added, because the Internet wasn't done solidifying in terms of capability (e.g. "AJAX? What's that?") or connectivity (PocketPC!).

Now, the Internet is a pretty well-known quantity.

So while Uber and Lyft and Masayoshi Son's portfolio might be massively overvaluing things, the fundamental nature is well understood.

Some stupid companies will die, but there are lots of companies making actual money doing actually useful things.

And the primary casualties of the dot-com bust are all so consolidated that the tools-impact will likely be lesser too. Amazon/MS/Google aren't going to go bankrupt over softer cloud demand.