If something has felt wrong about your current track for more than a year, you are not overreacting. Track changes happen, and they are more common than most career ladders admit. The reversal has real cost, months to execute and years to compound through, but it is doable.
The most common reversal is IC › Manager › IC. A practitioner takes their first management role at Lead, works in it for two to four years, and finds that the pull they followed into management was less durable than the pull back toward craft depth. They return to IC work, usually at a level equivalent to or slightly below where they would have been had they stayed IC throughout. The return rarely reverses again. Most who go back to IC after management stay IC for the rest of their career, and the management rotation becomes part of their history rather than a recurring pattern.
The less common pattern is Manager › IC directly, with no earlier IC experience to return to. This happens when a practitioner reached management by a non-traditional route (entering design from an adjacent discipline, say, and being promoted into management before accumulating the IC years most practitioners have), works in management for a period, and finds they want craft depth they never fully built. The return here is harder, because they are building craft depth at a later career stage with less accumulated craft capital. It is done, just slower.
The two-year rule is the working rule. If you have been on a track for two years and it has felt consistently wrong, that is the signal, because hard is different from wrong. The first year is usually too early, with adjustment costs still dominating the reading. The second year is enough time to have felt both the good stretches and the hard ones, and to know whether the track’s typical demands match your pattern. By year three, practitioners who stay in a wrong-track situation have often either reconciled themselves to something that will keep costing them, or built a workaround that delays the reckoning without resolving it.