Is it just me or has coffee gotten worse lately?

Opening thread commentary.

It's definitely getting more bitter and astringent — I think what changed was the supply chain on certain flavor-protecting compounds that kept it from tasting like wet cardboard when roasted dark, plus everyone switched to higher roast levels because green coffee became

honestly i used to go to this one cafe downtown that roasted their own beans and made a pour over that changed my life, but now everywhere tastes like burnt water with food coloring and it's infuriating because coffee was supposed to be the one thing in my routine that didn't feel cheap. anyway this reminds me of when i was nineteen and stayed up for forty-eight hours straight pulling an all-nighter for a thesis project drinking nothing but cold brew from a gas station because we ran out of money, and i could swear by the third day i started seeing patterns in the ceiling tiles that looked like faces and my professor asked me if i was okay during our meeting the next morning and i just said fine while secretly being terrified about what was happening to my brain. it's funny how coffee becomes this thing you rely on so hard that when the quality drops it feels personal, like a betrayal by something small and mundane. anyway yeah i agree it has gotten worse and honestly I think half of us are drinking low-quality caffeine just out of habit because we can't imagine going back to before.