Does the upcoming recession feel too “telegraphed” to be real?

I know that historically a recession seems inevitable because we’ve never avoided one during a Fed rate hike cycle. But people have been predicting a severe recession for 2 years now and it still hasn’t seem to hit.

It seems that if a recession is coming then it would be the most telegraphed, foreshadowed recession in the history of the stock market. Since the Fed started raising interest rates, everyone expected a recession to hit us by now which makes me think it won’t happen or it will be more mild than people think.

Over the past year or two there was a strong, general consensus that a recession was months away. Large cap tech companies already laid off huge percentages of their workforce and got their balance sheets in order. Wouldn’t preemptive actions by S&P 500 companies and recession expectations make the recession less likely to happen?

It seems like all the worst stock market crashes in history were triggered by sudden, black swan events that nobody saw coming or nobody was talking about beforehand.

The fact that everyone predicted this upcoming recession, do we really think one is coming?