If you’re wrong in your predictions nobody cares because it’s better than if you’re right.
On the other hand, if you’re an optimist and you are wrong you look like an idiot and the social penalty is higher.
So people continue to predict doomsday and most of the time it doesn’t happen.
Well, the same is true for any prediction of anything unlikely. People continue to predict world-changing innovations, and most of the time they are wrong. That's the reality of any low-probability/high-impact prediction, in the positive or negative direction.
As a specific case of that: most startups fail, so predicting a startup will fail is safe.
I'm pretty prone to exactly that prediction. But I like this quote from Erik Davis (https://www.google.ch/books/edition/High_Weirdness/Rcq2DwAAQ...): "In the court of the mind, skepticism makes a great grand vizier, but a lousy lord."
We're in a housing bubble, at the peak of a multi-century economic mega-cycle, we're overdue for earthquakes, tsunamis, asteroids, the caldera under Yellowstone, flu pandemics, etc etc. It's super easy to say all that and demand people should listen, what's hard is committing to any actionable prediction.