I'm in the "worse than 2008" camp, mostly due to the reasons the OP gives. Another consideration is that our current expansion has been a very long one, and the longer an expansion goes on, the more fraudulent cruft accumulates, the cruft beings things like assets not marked to actual market value, money-losing businesses subsidized in various ways, and sometimes outright Madoff-like fraud. This cruft appears financially viable from the outside but collapses when stressed, and nobody really knows how much of it is out there.
There isn't anything like the housing bubble right now. There's nothing that really allows people who shouldn't be able to borrow lots of money to borrow lots of money like housing did last time.
What you're describing is just the normal stuff that happens in all recessions.
And as much as we had a long boom, we also had quite a long painful recovery from 2008, it wasn't the same as normal recovery which explains why it's been so long since the last recession.
There's the looming student debt crisis, which is absolutely allowing lots of people to borrow money they shouldn't be able to get. People are graduating college well into six figures of debt with nearly worthless degrees that pay little more than minimum wage. Even worse, the government guarantees that debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, leaving no way out for the underwater borrowers.
The student loan thing is more of a big weight dragging on the middle class. It’s not like anything is going to implode — the debt isn’t dischargeable. Instead, it’s just going to drag on and on for decades, preventing the lower classes from building wealth or having kids. (In many ways, that’s a lot worse)
I used to think VCs and startups were the next bubble, but the ridiculous investments seemed to be rarer these days. (though I still think many so called unicorns are overvalued)
