I've lived through crises such as Nixon, Iran-Contra, the Arab gas embargoes, the Savings and Loans (S&L) crisis, and the 2001 tech collapse, in addition to the events you've mentioned. It seems, though, that we lived through all of those, but we were able to survive the events, and we may still have been a bit dented, but we could function. We (I) didn't feel hopeless.
I think you are dead on with the observation that what we are going through now is like previously intense but much shorter-lived events, except it's going all the time. Because it's not stopping, we're not getting a chance to breathe and figure out what the next thing to do is.
I think of the previous events; only COVID-19 and the 2008 banking crisis were similar multi-year persistent events and have increasingly cemented a sense of precariousness.