This is an interesting take, but one that looks at a very narrow sliver of time in the marketplace. Anything COVID -era is highly skewed by the great resignation, the inflated numbers of jobs created by it, and the return to the normal cycle. During the COVID years you could be here on medium or social media listening to people talking about how they had high paying jobs but didn't do anything at work. Those were the times when businesses were trying to line their coffers with talent. Then came the years of cost optimization - and that didn't mean just cutting supplier or data center costs.

Hiring comes in periods of growth and the larger IT market is trailing that by a few years. We will continue to streamline down to what is "necessary" before we get back to the years of abundance. But as has ALWAYS happened, the cycle will come back. It always has, it always will. AI will solve a narrow set of use cases and as businesses realize this, and the associated costs of deploying it versus the monetization of what they created (TLDR; most projects are time and money sinks) - the smarter ones will hedge on a blended model to enhance the existing workforce and the others will burn excess capital and struggle to compete.

If you really want to look at the trend, you need to look at it in terms of the larger economic cycles, not the narrow "what happened in the past 2 years" slice of time.