In part you have the “gig” economy to thank.

Pretty much everyone can be nominally working as an Uber, Lyft, door Dasher, etc. You might have no guaranteed work in any given time and even weeks without pay, but you still count as “employed”.

So if you are stuck, you might as well sign up with one of those and get what you can from it. Before you would have been clearly unemployed but now it’s super easy to end up counted as “self employed”. So the unemployment numbers just never go up like they used to even when reality is more like the unemployment going up