I suppose I appreciate the underlying sentiment of your post, but the initial premise of what you're asserting is entirely disconnected from the conclusion you draw: people choosing not to go back to their old jobs during the pandemic does not relate to (or support) the idea that "people don't understand development, progress based on performance," etc.
You are placing your own singular interpretation of the varied reasons "millions of Americans...decided not to return to their old job" as being only "I want something better right now." I disagree with that premise on its face, to begin with, but it also wildly over-generalizes the choices made by "millions" in various circumstances and places in their lives. There can be no factual dispute that a significant part of his trend, at this time, is employees simply not feeling safe to return to work and choosing their health (and their family's health) over their job. Beyond that, this movement should rationally be seen as an expression of developing trends in employment which cannot be dispositively linked to the assertion "I want something better right now" and the implied "I don't want to work hard to get it at some point in the future." To be blunt, a lot of recent job growth has been jobs that just plain suck, offer low pay (relative to cost of living) with no real advancement (wage growth had completely stagnated until very recently), doing repetitive grunt work that grinds anyone down over time, while having no sense that your job is meaningful in any way (which studies have shown to be more important to workers even than relative salary). Over the past forty plus years, we have shipped manufacturing and better paying jobs overseas where companies can pay pennies on the dollar for labor, leaving essentially dead-end service jobs as the main replacement "industry." Most jobs do not offer pensions anymore, having been replaced with the moveable 401K system and its ilk, so that companies don't have to be on the hook to their employees long term. And yet your premise appears to complain that it's only the employees that have no loyalty, drive, patience, or commitment. Sure, that may be AN issue, but is not the only issue, or even the one ultimately driving any of these particular trends.
To assert that all these millions of people have chosen not to go back to work only because they are too impatient and demanding is a massive leap of speculative over-generalization.
Bringing this back to CU football, the reasons for workers choosing not to return to jobs that don't value them is only connected to the CU problem if you conclude that CU players do not feel there is a future at CU for them to flourish and benefit. Why else would a player go to (or stay) at a football program? All of this seems to have little to do with players not wanting to work hard and has everything to do with what reasonable expectations those players may have if they do work hard. Why would a player rationally wish to stay in a program that they see as a dead-end? Why would a player rationally choose to stay at a program that is on the bottom of the competitive heap, churning through day after day of hard work with little expectation of that status improving? Why would a running back choose to stay on a team where he will run into a wall of defensive linemen on every play, when he may be able to find a team capable of opening running lanes as a matter of course. Sure, some of this is players wanting to go someplace they don't have to ride the bench for years in hopes of getting on the field, and the transfer portal opened a door for that. But that's not really the problem we are facing. We are losing the guys already on the field.
That's before we even add in the NIL component, as the biggest concerns with this program relate to the loss of our best players who might actually have a path to NIL money. To wit, the present problem with CU football is not the players on the team--or getting the "right" players who don't care that we suck and are willing to work hard and commit to the program without question regardless of its floundering status.
CU Football is CU Football's problem--systemic and wide-ranging.
(Sorry it took so long to get to this conclusion. Clearly, this hit a broader nerve.)