>Once you look at the actual numbers it’s not the sea change we’ve been hearing about everywhere.
Ehh, that's debatable and much harder to prove either way.
For years before the pandemic there have been complaints from every industry about companies trimming down teams/workforces to the smallest possible size. People were doing the jobs of 2 or 3 people were a common issue that was brought up, if anyone was sick the employer demanded you come to work anyway. And that's when things were good. Now add a large portion of employees being sick at any one time and suddenly the work machine is being driven over capacity and much like an overloaded TCP/IP network, congestion collapse occurs. Even a small change in the most productive employees moving jobs could lead to large disruptions inside of a business.
Anecdotally this is something I witnessed. We had pretty low rates of employee attrition during the pandemic, but the employees that did leave were some of the most influential.