I honestly thought the pandemic would be the trigger for a recession. Clearly that wasn't the case (or at least it was a delayed effect). This doesn't seem to be a case where a single event triggered a recession (eg subprime in 2008). It seems to be a combination of events.
Inflation is a big one. This one is interesting because the two biggest factors (housing and gas) are completely artificial price hikes. Housing is a double whammy because we had artificially cheaper housing in the last 2 years because of the pandemic. That makes price hikes seem worse than they are (note: there still are significant price hieks in rents). There's pent up demand from the pandemic. There's some institutional buying of homes (which honestly should be outlawed). But really it's just price hikes "because we can".
Gas was triggered by Ukraine but that's just another "because we can" situation. The Biden administration could ban exports of refined petroleum products if they really wanted to apply downward pressure to gas prices. It's not that Biden has a bad energy policy. He seems to have no energy policy.
And then there's crypto. What a lot of people are learning is that the only thing holding up the crypto bubble was the collective belief in continued speculative gains. That's literally it, even for the (supposed) stablecoins.
I personally see crypto as a massive waste of energy (eg Bitcoin energy usage is about the same as Sweden's) for very little utility so I personally hoped the bubble would burst because crypto is such a massive example of a solution desperately searching for a problem. I can't say this was or is inevitable. Collective delusion can last a really long time. But I hope the bubble does burst.
Obviously this sucks if you work (or, rather, worked) for Coinbase. At least they're getting some severance. It may be a rough time for finding a new job, even for software engineers, for a couple of years, something that hasn't really been true for >12 years.