Sorry, but these people are not victims. I went through a tech PhD; it was well-known how fast the wind changes and the trendy topic falls by the wayside. Big data and crowdsourcing pre-AI boom, then ML, then ethics of AI (around 2020-21), now we are at AI agents which is inherently more product-oriented. Beyond this, we had COVID and a now brutal tech market, despite the US economy seemingly way up and the AI craze continuing. If you went into a CS PhD thinking nothing changes and people will beg you to take cushy salary positions with total freedom, then you simply didn’t do your research.