Its mostly just increased reporting. Tech companies overhired when when they were doing well during lockdowns and are laying people off now that the increased revenue didn’t hold indefinitely.
https://layoffs.fyi/ has been tracking layoffs in the tech sector since covid and the charts show how much more layoffs there were in 2023 (particularly January and February). It seems like the biggest change is that now every time there is a layoff it gets more news coverage.
While I generally agree with this it feels wrong in this case since everyone who bought it can get a refund.
About 3 years ago I played a CoD during the free weekend and had mostly the same experience as you. What I found to be the cause of the problems is that the starter guns have a much higher time to kill than the unlocked and modded guns that the rest of the players were using. Players know to prefire based on the map at the top-left. The game basically has a built in radar hack. You can camp a corner, aim at the opening, and watch the map to know when to prefire. Players who started playing when the game launched and are still playing have memorized the spawn locations and know where to aim to catch fresh respawns.
If you have a browser that still supports javascript bookmarklets and are brave enough to trust code from a random stranger online I have a bookmarkelet that I got from a random stranger online years ago that cleans all of that junk from links on the entire page making them safe to click.
javascript:(function(){var%20k,x,t,i,j,p;%20for(k=0;x=document.links[k];k++){t=x.href.replace(/[%]3A/ig,':').replace(/[%]2f/ig,'/');i=t.lastIndexOf('http');if(i>0){%20t=t.substring(i);%20j=t.indexOf('&');%20if(j>0)t=t.substring(0,j);%20p=/https?\:\/\/[^\s]*[^.,;'">\s\)\]]/.exec(unescape(t));%20if(p)%20x.href=p[0];%20}%20else%20if%20(x.onmouseover&&x.onmouseout){x.onmouseover();%20if%20(window.status%20&&%20window.status.indexOf('://')!=-1)x.href=window.status;%20x.onmouseout();%20}%20x.onmouseover=null;%20x.onmouseout=null;%20}})();
There have been a few videos by hardware reviewers to address the sample size concern. Gamers Nexus tested 3 different CPU models with 20+ CPUs each and found that the biggest variance from lowest to highest performance was under 4% while performance variance in most cases was about 2%
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUeZQ3pky-w
The way CPU manufacturing and binning are done means that cpus in particular will have very minor differences within the same model number.