I think you have stated the right symptoms and identified a great angle.
Indeed the fact that "similarly employees are terrified of ending up in a career dead-end"
is related to the increase in the width of the Overton window.
Indeed it's "ironic" that it's happening at the same time there is an explosion in the amount of information available.
And indeed it's about institutions.
But once we make those extraordinary observations, we tend to use a vocabulary centered around the world trust,
and run the risk of veering off course. The multiple subtle uses of the word "trust" weaken the argument.
For example you could argue Uber, Airbnb also happened and they use a huge amount of trust.
A trick I like ot do is to replace the word trust with "adhesion", a more precise word.
It focuses the debate on a narrow phenomena and enable a different framework of thought.
It also suggests conclusions about what's happening and highlights interesting features.
Our conscious decisions are made inside a symbolic fabric. For the sake of the arguments, let's reduce human beings
to symbolic organisms living in an information ecosystem. That ecosystem is grounded in a physical reality,
which govern its functionning. The way it works when embodied in parchment scrolls is different
from the way it works when it's printed text.
What we usullay call information revolution is what happens when the physical artefacts underpining our information ecosystem change.
When it happens it also changes the laws of our symbolic reality. A mental universe where, using google instant,
one is able to refine a query, ten discover what she is actually looking for, learn that it actually exists,
find related topics, compare them, find highly relevant comments, again and again... dozens of times a day
is a totally different mental universe than the one we had merely 20 years ago.
If you were to close your eyes, suppress any thoughts about your physical surroundings,
consider how we collectively process information and compare it to previous era,
you would conclude that our minds have been propulsed into a sci-fi future
and are living some kind of star trek fantasy.
That is maybe controversial, but the consequences about who we have become are interesting.
Using again the symbolic organism metaphor, as the governing laws of our symbolic reality have changed, we also have evolved.
Far more than we acknowledge. Our inner selves are being projected so far in the future, we are becoming aliens to our previous selves.
Imagine if the strength of gravity was reduced to a thousandth of its current strength. The effect it would have on our bodies would be dramatic.
That is what is happening to us.
You don't have to agree with that, but if you do you will start to see the problem.
Our institutions which really are symbolic machinery or building, have been built implicitly
following the laws of our symbolic reality. But while we are changing under the action
of our new environment, our institutions are not.
The distance is growing, between people and the institutions that purport to guide them.
As if they are gliding through them. They are less and less made of the same matter.
What we are witnessing is an adhesion crisis.
Wearing those lenses, you will see more and more signs of what you mentionned in your comment.
Lack of trust is the form it takes when people are actively engaging in a particular situation like during elections.
Most of the time a growing minority is subconsciously deconnecting from institutions without even realizing it
and without an ounce of ill will. Right now, some tech workers, working in Big Co are reading this site at this very moment,
just to relax a little bit. Not realizing it's the 21st century equivalent of reading a anarcho-communist
rag at lunch time while working for Ford circa 1920. The difference is nowadays you have to do it to stay relevant.
As times goes, that hidden "negative" adhesion potential, is building up,
opening some cracks here and there. It is passively looking for anything, institution-like,
that will help channel it's energy.
And crypto looks like something that at least address the problem.