It has already been happening for several years now, it’s just accelerated since Trump. Even before his first term there was a “negative brain drain” of educated workers no longer coming into the US because the benefits (paid time off, health care, etc) are so much worse compared to other countries, even when considering the higher pay. America used to rely on a steady stream of incoming highly educated workers.
But now there is a huge amount of well established academics leaving for Canada, EU, or anywhere else that will pay them. I work in a physics department at a large R1 university in a very liberal state, and we are losing 4 (that I know of) high regarded professors just this year alone moving to other countries.
The brain drain is here, and won’t be reversing course even if Trump suddenly disappears. We would have to completely change how we reward work and our failing healthcare system for anything to change.
The same thing can be true about variable names, and it is often more time consuming and error prone to change a variable name to match its new meaning than to simply update a comment. Especially if the variable name is public facing through an API or library then there is a huge cost to change the name everywhere that might reference it.