I say this not only for us amateurs but for TOUR players.
As a Norwegian/American, I watch the progress of Viktor Hovland. He is in a desert. Jordan, Rickie, and Justin Thomas are all struggling. Can any of them recapture their previous form? We have seen some guys lose their game and never get it back. When is your game too far gone to get it back?
I wouldn't conflate what professional athletes, including golfers, face with the rest of us. Their careers are very short, and their window for playing their best is very small. We get fooled by some of the superstars, but the reality is that the average career at the highest levels of football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and soccer is 5 years or less; golf is longer at around 10 years or so. The margins for professional athletes is very, VERY small, and golf is no exception. Check out the Korn Ferry Tour list; there are a LOT of guys who at some point in the past contended on the big tour, made a lot of money or even won, whose window closed, at least at the Tour level.
Hovland and Speith are instructive. Both have made HUGE amounts of money at very young ages. Speith is in his early 30's now, with 3 young children, and his estimated net worth is north of $100m. In addition to already having well over a decade on Tour, add to that the possible decline of physical skills, and the question becomes whether or not he has the same motivation to work at his game now that he had 10 years ago? I don't know the answer to that, but it's an open question, I think. At that, Speith has already made nearly 3/4's of a million dollars so far in 2025; he could continue to make money without ever returning to his "glory years" for a long time to come.
Hovland is a bit younger, and seems to be making swing changes, but it's important to remember that he had a year in 2023 that few have ever matched; to expect him to maintain that level of play probably isn't reasonable. And Hovland is still ranked 15th in the world, and has made north of $200k in only 3 tournaments so far in 2025. Will he ever again be as high as #3 in the world? Maybe, but the odds are against it because, well, that's just the way odds work. But he could play another decade on Tour and make millions yet, so maybe we don't write an Hovland obituary right now, even if he never makes it back to the top 5 in the world.
We had a guy at the HS in GA where I coached who played college golf, and then played professionally for a number of years. He was mostly on what is now the Korn Ferry Tour (then Nike, I think), but had his Tour card several times for about a decade. We were talking one day, and he made this statement: "People get fooled by Tiger and Phil and the other top guys; the rest of us are just trying to ride a hot putter for a few weeks each year long enough to keep our cards."
We're different, of course, because we have various devices available to us that professional golfers just don't. We play shorter tees, we play against other living fossils, we get more strokes as our indexes inevitably rise, and so forth. Different world.