The point is, I lived through the times you're citing as "a time of large layoffs". I was hiring in at least one of them (actually, all of them, in different contexts). It was very hard to find engineers. By no even semi-objective measurement were 2012, 2016 and 2017 lean times for the industry. Virtually every tech company was hiring like crazy.

Maybe they were bad for someone, but that's always true. I'm sure a brand-new coding school grad has a hard time in most markets, for example.