There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around.
If "people decided they didn’t really want to work so much" since the pandemic, it's because they've had enough of being treated like sh!t by scumbag employers, many of whom took advantage of the downturn to force through workplace changes that would never have been acceptable under normal circumstances. There's more to life than working for such assholes and people like Gurner need to understand that simple fact.