It's also true that for every thing that turned out to be horrible, there were people saying "this is gonna be great". Do you then also also dismiss all optimism?
Why is this fallacy only employed in one direction? It's not an argument either way, it's just spam, but I wonder why it only ever gets deployed in one direction.
Look, when you get to my age, you've literally seen it happen through multiple generations. As a kid growing up, parents thought we were the lost generation. Then I started growing up and I thought the next generation was the lost one. Then they grew up and they think the next one is doomed. It's so absurd to see it happening over and over. And everybody always thinks they have the unique and correct perspective.
I've seen it happen even as a young person, and still saw the fallacy of this "argument". I've been arguing with people twice my age who used it to silence any criticism of trends.
And it's totally an online thing, too. It's usually used to dismiss a thing without looking at the thing. Because if you could dismiss the thing by looking at it, you wouldn't need that old chestnut.
I don't blame young people for having less to look forward to than previous generations. I don't blame them for being unable to code, and so on. Blaming them for their lot is totally orthogonal to even having a honest look at what that lot is.
I never thought of a new generation failing the one's before it, being "lost" -- rather the other way around. We failed them. And by the same token, I also never dismissed people as being old and knowing nothing even when I was 20. I simply never once rolled that way, and I see nothing interesting, much less truthful, coming from it.