Edit: thanks for the gracious reply. I was probably overly defensive myself.

I didn’t read all of that, but what I gathered is that it’s relying on survey response about future expectation? And probably being conflated a bit with the end of ZIRP and the effect that had on the market in general. I think it’s rather more likely that tech companies were allowed to play with funny money for a while, driving up demand, and suddenly when we are on a rebound from that people want to point to AI as a scapegoat to avoid saying, “Yeah we over hired while it was advantageous and now we are cutting back to prior levels.” I’ve seen first hand what happens to tech businesses that try to go “all in on AI” and it isn’t a happy story for the company anymore than the employees.