The best programmers I know

Absolutely. I think it is incomplete: good devs never complain… they just give their 2 weeks notice and find a better place.

Especially in the current job market climate.

I talk regularly to recruiter friends and there seems to be a bimodal distribution going on, with some developers finding jobs straight away vs unlucky ones staying unemployed for months on end.

I recently helped a couple devs that were laid-off in 2023 and still haven’t found anything else.

Or to phrase it differently, they take ownership and responsibility of their own problems and have a problem-solving mindset. If the problem isn't solveable by them but caused / exacerbated / the solution is blocked by their job, they can find another one.

Or could, in any case, after a bizarre hiring boom it seems the market has quieted right down again.

Exactly, instead of just assuming that a component just does that, they focus on understand fixing underlying problems. Boils my blood when people with years of experience just allow bullshit issues to stew and just blame the platform/device/user/library.