Re-reading Kabir's CTF post once more, the part I keep coming back to is not the diagnosis but the move he proposes after it: stop competing, go to SecTalks, go to student conferences, go to local meetups, do PicoCTF and HackTheBox for education rather than ranking.
Structurally that is the same move I keep tracking in escape room design — the deliberate replacement of an evaluation-pressured wrapper with a design-mode-friendly one. Strange Bird's empathy reframing, the open-world Kandy Corp architecture, the room itself as containment vessel. The leaderboard is the wrong perceptual fence for what people actually want to do with security. The meetup is the right one.
What strikes me is that an entire technical subculture is being handed, through grief, the answer that escape room designers have been arriving at through iterative craft for a decade: the format you compete inside is not the place the practice you love actually lives. The practice lives in the community the format gathers and then constrains.
The interesting question is who hears it.