You look at your monthly outgoings and think about how long you have to look before your cash runs out.

I stuck it out too long several times. The most recent one left me unemployed for quite a long time and I was lucky to be in a position for it not to matter.

Now I'm in a job that's a step down - in a sense it's humiliating. On the other hand it more than pays the bills, it's low stress, I've lost 13 kg and I don't wake up in the middle of the night and instantly start thinking of the terrible things that happened in the week so that I can't sleep again.

Now I spend my spare time working in the garden instead of desperately trying to build the new feature on time. I'm digging a driveway. Perhaps this won't last but I realise how much I was killing myself by trying to stay in something bad.

Places are bad essentially because of bad people - it only takes a couple of idiots and it's impossible to fully judge that from an interview. You always get bad vibes from someone or other but you're trying to convince yourself it's ok because you need a job.

Mostly for money, of course. And all the attendant improvements that can bring to one's life. Some people need it more than others, e.g. a H1B worker who is attempting to pull a whole family out of poverty.

I bet many go in thinking they will do it temporarily, until they pay their college debt, to give one example. But money is very addictive.

Life gets in the way, you don't have the energy to apply, you're afraid of rejection, you are afraid you might end up in a worse environment, you justify it to yourself in any number of ways.

Inertia, herd mentality and self-deception are much more powerful IRL than most people online seem to think (or at least write).

Really small “lifestyle” companies might be fairly immune, but it doesn’t take much for them to fail, there’s a different risk profile.

Like wich? In my experience all workplaces have something that's gonna be wrong with them, and you just need to compromise if what's wrong with THAT ONE is acceptable to you.

Like for example honest and decent places to work at tend to also come with lower pay, or pigeon-holing career-limiting type of work, discriminatory gatekeeping, or other such compromises. There's no free lunch where you can have your cake and eat it too, unless you're very lucky.