I do think it is reasonable for the competes to include not stealing recipes or IP or other capital from the business. Contacts are harder to legislate but there is a difference between remembering your best contacts and contacting them via LinkedIn vs exporting a contact list from your company's Salesforce and using that.
What if you work at Starbucks and want to open your own coffee shop. Is it reasonable that you should not be able to open a coffee shop within two blocks of any existing Starbucks?
you trade getting to learn for agreeing not to use it against them for a while -- is the theory
at line worker level i'd argue this is nonsense, at 'how to mill iPhones from a single block of metal' or 'self driving car brain' maybe its real, but there are ndas and patents for that
In your example, they cannot claim the skills and basic education that gets you up to the point of "how they mill iphones within a context" (i.e. the milling, operating the machinery, physical properties of the metal, etc)
They are not legally able to include a huge educational backbone of knowledge (that they may have taught you) as their prioptary IP. Again, NCs don't prevent that disemination. That disemination can happen without employment.
https://beneinstein.medium.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-...
To impose punitive measures after-the-fact because someone taught you how to do a job that they needed you to do seems hilarious even on the face of it.
To be clear, saying "You're not allowed to use our IP or our machinery or our supplies" is totally reasonable; if I quit Starbucks, then of course I won't have Starbucks machines or merch. To say that you're not allowed to do something because they happened to be the ones to train you seems just silly.
I get very strong middle-school vibes, where you introduce your friend-from-another-school to your group, then get mad when they become better friends with someone else than they are with you.
How are you examining these rules that it "doesn't seem especially crazy?", what's the rationale?
Capitalism requires competition to produce positive outcomes, the only reason to limit or ban competition is in the edge cases where the model doesn't work (patents, utilities, etc). Frankly we have too many regulatory moats as it is IMO.
The general rules that most states use for deciding when non-competes are enforceable aren't that bad. E.g. if you work at a bakery, you're not going to be allowed to open your own bakery two blocks away within a year, but it's fine if you do it a couple towns over. That doesn't seem especially crazy to me.