My former senior developer was an incredibly competent nodejs dev and a great mentor. He left our company because management wouldn't really respect his opinion

My former senior developer was an incredibly competent nodejs dev and a great mentor. He left our company because management wouldn't really respect his opinions because he'd only been with us for 3 years when others had been for 20. The company he moved to was a fintech startup that worked him insanely hard but again didn't give him much respect or agency over what he was building. Then the pandemic hit and they reduced his pay, so he left that job without anything lined up. He ended up in a 6 month job search, and when he finally got a job it was in a role no more senior than either of the 2 he had just left. Those 6 months were pretty grueling for him, and I'm sure a lot of the reason it took so long was because it was hard to find a job in the pandemic, but when you're trying to find a job and failing to, it wears on your self esteem and your soul, in ways that compound the difficulty of finding the job. And realistically, 6 months isn't even that long when it could've become 1 or 2 years. That said, I became insanely burnt out at my job after he left and kept telling him that I was going to quit with nothing lined up. He just kept telling me it would be the stupidest mistake for me to do that and for my situation (still early in my career, have some savings but not a ton, some minor family-related issues going on) he was definitely right. I did work through the burn-out, though I may have permanently lost some enthusiasm for software development because of it. Or possibly I'm just still burnt out.