The long and short of it is sometime Friday last week notifications stopped working. It took them until some time mid afternoon today before it finally started working again. That 3 days of a basic site function not working was the last straw for a lot of people.
Something breaking on a Friday and not being fixed until after the weekend isn't _too_ surprising to me. I mean, it sucks, but it's not like it kills the site... except that, you're right, users are fed up with all the enshittification, so they very understandably have no patience left for this.
That said, notifications are _supposedly_ working again, but I still had a reply that didn't have a notification. Maybe it's from before they were fixed, and the fix was not retroactive?
The fix was not retroactive. All the notifications from the 3 days the system was down are just lost to the void. Notifications are mostly back up, it's hard to tell right now if the ongoing protest screwing with the server is causing some to still fail or if the system just isn't 100%