This might not be helpful, but it appears the OP struggled for so long because they were too attached to the project or an unrealistic expectation of growth. I

This might not be helpful, but it appears the OP struggled for so long because they were too attached to the project or an unrealistic expectation of growth. It’s critical to get feedback about your choices and to second-guess your attachment, if only to have that evidence or perspective available to you. Without it, it’s highly likely unexpected events carry greater personal risk, like a re-org causing a lot of distress or even happening unexpectedly at all. How aligned are you with the business leaders? It’s worth trying to meet people outside the team on a quarterly basis. The other sad result here is that the OP chose to fight leveraging a rational argument versus the buy-in of others. It’s easy to call the other side stupid, but the reality is you have to convince them of your perspective and not necessarily that your argument is right. To make matters worse, corporate structure is fundamentally opposed to threats from below. You can have green hair and get fired because they only want people with purple hair. Stories like these suggest (at least to me) that engineers need to work a bit more to reshape the industry into a gig economy. That means being more open to changing jobs, supporting portable and open technologies, and also establishing a more transparent hiring process. There’s a huge gap between supply and demand for engineers. That gap will be around for a while. Leveraging that gap should provide a path for preventing stories like these.