So, part of the issue is that those "last 2 years" also simultaneously felt a bit like an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic via lockdowns and infection f

So, part of the issue is that those "last 2 years" also simultaneously felt a bit like an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic via lockdowns and infection fear. Maybe for some relevant areas of "tech", such as video conferencing, sure: people alone at home would make that stuff overly important in a way that would crash back down... but, I certainly had felt a world that went from being pretty awesome in 2019 to businesses shutting down left and right through 2020 and 2021 due to people all staying inside. I had not just hoped but kind of expected that, if we ever again felt reasonably safe returning outside and eating at restaurants and shopping together at stores and going out to theaters and the such, that things--including, very relevantly, advertisements on Google for all of those physical products, services, and entertainment options people might now want again--would kind of explode from latent demand and pent up frustration during the COVID period... not that we would only THEN go into a recession! But like, I guess this is why we can say with some certainty that I don't know much about complicated global- or even national- scale financial matters as I didn't know much about how--and very critically when--the Federal Reserve functions (having not had to care at all about this around 2008/9, when I had my bandwagon hitched strongly to the iPhone and everything looked amazing) and have never actively tracked inflation indicators as anything other than a dry numerical input for CPI wage increases :(.