Unfortunately, I think it's just a continuation of a trend that already started pre-covid. I was surprised that most juniors and interns I worked with seemed to lack the ability to "self-help" and Google basic questions they had. I think it reflects a schooling system in the US that doesn't teach any real critical thinking - just studying until you "know" the answer, without actually teaching students the intuition of how to get there. The result is that when they encounter something not even novel, but slightly unfamiliar they don't even make an attempt to start or immediately tunnel vision down the wrong path without taking a first step back. Funnily, the latter approach feels similar to how LLMs perform on truly novel problems, too.