It is interesting to see how a person would experience the mating market. I've never moved to a more traditional country in Eastern Europe in attempts to get my penis wet. I've been an early Millennial in the USA's mating market for 20+ years.
As for the American dating market, my last success was really 1994.
The market really seemed to drop out after that as the only non-obese chicks that seemed to be out & about were single mommies
- this was due to the Baby Bust (Gen-X), well before OLD and hypergamy took hold).
I was alive in 1994-1996. I was still pre-high school then, so I wasn't participating in the market. I am old enough to remember life then. Being a late 20s Gen X'er in 1994-1996 would have been easier in certain ways than being a late 20s Millennial in the early 2010s.
Hypergamy has always been a thing but the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s-1970s and the greater acceptance of online dating in the 2000s made it worse in the USA.
I do think it is weird that you only were dealing with non-obese single mommies in 1994-1996 as a late 20s guy. If I had been in my late 20s in the mid-1990s, I think I would have been meeting normal weight women who were childless close to my age. My main advantage over you is normal height. I've not had to deal with overweight women as a normal weight guy. Throughout my 30s, I've only been dealing with childless women. The fact that you were mainly encountering single moms in 1994-1996 leads me to believe that you weren't in a populous area in 1994-1996. This experience sounds like a smaller city (under ~250,000 - 300,000 people).
I knew that the Baby Echo (Millennials) would come and that I might be able to get back into the game, but by then women had gotten even worse with single-mommying & fat-acceptance, and there was still the problem that a lot of American women have about older men: "yeww". And of course, this all preceded the hypergamic OLD dystopia that is our current horror.
A big problem for you in trying to attract-seduce Millennials in the USA would have been your age. You are an older Gen X. Flash back to 2006. In 2006 in the USA, you would have been a 40 year old Gen X'er trying to get with 21-24 year old Millennials. In order to pull that off, you would have needed to be quite wealthy. Even an average height guy would need wealth to pull that off. A 6'0"+ guy would need some wealth, but less than a 5'9-5'11" guy.
You're right that by 2006, online dating was starting. It was less of a thing in 2006 than 2010-present. There were women on Match, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish in 2006 getting hundreds of messages in their inboxes, upping the hypergamy factor.
You're also correct that the typical Millennial woman is fatter than the typical Gen X woman of the same age 15 years earlier.
Childlessness is more common in USA Millennial women than Gen X women at the same age. This is why I've been able to spend my 30s dating childless Millennial women in their 30s. This has also happened because I reside in the one of the biggest metro areas in the USA.
The woman in the article posted in the first post is a 30 something Millennial in the UK having experiences similar to 30 something Millennial single moms in the USA.