The most important macroeconomic policy wrt recessions is monetary and they look at prices, the CPI and things that signal a hot (too strong) economy. If they paid attention to consumer sentiment, whether or not people expected a recession, they would not hike rates or would actually cut them. It’s more complicated than I can lay out in a short post, so I would just ask you or the parent poster to provide an example of a recession that was driven by sentiment alone. I can’t think of any.