The framing of this makes it seem like this is a sharp change in trend, but this long-running layoff tracker shows no evidence of this.

2020 and 2023 both had serious layoff spikes, but the 2023 spike trailed off to an asymptote that we're still hovering around.

https://layoffs.fyi/

Habermas was truly a giant. Regardless of your political outlook, some engagement with his texts is time well spent. For an accessible on-ramp to his work, I recommend:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#PublSphe

"Frankfurt School Critical Theory" went through several generations with different commitments and each of those generations was quite politically and theoretically diverse.

The only true statements that hold for all writers at all times are largely uninteresting.

What can be said with confidence is that Frankfurt School theorists were not "counter-enlightenment".

Adorno and Horkheimer were explicitly trying to explain why the ideal of the enlightenment - greater rationality in social and political affairs and a fuller realization of individual moral autonomy - had not been achieved in their time. They saw themselves, rightly, as more faithful heirs to the tradition in their attempt to "rescue" it than those who insisted it did not require rescue. You may disagree - many within the tradition of critical theory have - but I don't think readings of their texts which see them as "counter-enlightement" can be sustained.

"I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories."

With all due respect, this sentence betrays a complete unfamiliarity with "postmodernism", "the long march through the institutions", and "identity politics". It wildly anachronistic to conflate these. It makes about as much sense as saying that Mitterand was an Avignon pope.

The premise of your argument is that "the outcome" can be separated from the process. This is true enough for manufacturing bricks: I don't much care what processes was used to create a brick if it has certain a compressive strength, mass, etc.

But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually be distinguished, even if a distinction in thought is possible among economic theorists.

Quantitative measures of this are very poor, and even those are mixed.

My subjective assessment is that agents like Copilot got better because of better harnesses and fine tuning of models to use those harnesses. But they are not improving in the direction of labor substitution, but rather in the direction of significant, but not earth-shaking, complementarity. That complementarity is stronger for more experienced developers.