I think the main thing is the lack of on-ramps. Once you have fallen out of the social circulation, there is basically no way of going back. Unless you are able to stay within an extremely narrow range of behaviours (in terms of not being weird, basically speaking expected thinks in expected tone of voice and body language), nobody wants to associate with you. And since about the only way to learn these things is to be around people who already behave in the "right" way, a vicious circle arises.

It has nothing to do with debt, wealth or earnings. Completely independent things. People had it worse at every time in history in almost every place.

It has nothing to do with social media / internet. It just something people tend to fall into when they withdraw, and have no trouble abandoning as soon as the life outside becomes tenable again.

I mean I've seen it happen with unrealistic stakeholders. Business forces the team to make a false commitment to a specific ship date with a specific set of features. It's obvious that the team can't hit that mark but telling the stakeholders that will just result in them refusing to budge and telling you that you need to come up with a plan to make it happen.

Eventually it's easier to just agree with them and do your best than waste even more time arguing with them. Eventually you fail to ship or you ship a buggy mess. The software engineers know the code quality is shit but they don't have time to think or set anything up.

My experience with Dialyzer wasn't great a few years ago. The error messages are often counter-intuitive, to the point where hating dialyzer became a meme at work.

It can only be good when the interface already knows a massive amount of context. For example the LLM in a future use case knows all your email and you just ask it to draw a time line of this thread and etc.

If you are asking it to do stuff from scratch like most of us do on ChatGPT, it’s quite a pain

Sure, plenty of work. PHP powers a large majority of web sites. Almost all of my customers use PHP to some degree, often exclusively.

A big portion of the PHP stats (number of web sites using it) come from WordPress. While WP sites need less development than sites built from scratch, or with Laravel, they still need maintenance, custom code, and system administration. Someone who can keep a WP site humming and enhance it can find plenty of work.

If you can't find suitable work that has very little to do with a programming language. Businesses don't need more PHP code. They need people who can add business value and deliver on requirements. Programming languages are almost incidental in the big picture. My advice is to focus on selling yourself based on the value you offer to an employer or customer, not on a language.