Because of ZIRP, there's an entire generation of business leaders that have mastered raising money but have no idea how to make it. Expect to see many more own goals like this in the next few years as they try to figure out how.
Also, this entire generation has no problems speaking about what make them successful, writing books/blogs about business, being keynote speakers etc when they would never be able to build a single business without massive financing. This is changing American entrepreneurship for the worse - in the past, the stories used to be all about someone starting a small business with no or limited seed money and slowly building an empire from scratch.
I feel like this applies to consumers too. We have a whole generation of people that don’t want to pay for anything (speaking generally, not just Unity related). People are building their businesses using tools that are free/near-free and that are losing vast sums of money. It’s created a broken market both from the supply and demand sides and it’s why businesses are having to resort to subscriptions. Almost none of the people using Photoshop would pay $1000 for it every time a new major update comes out, even though they use it daily in their business and generate their income from it.
This is just reality though. I know it really feels "wrong" that money was so cheap for so long, but in all likelihood, interest rates will return to close-to-zero in the long run precisely for the factors you call out.
Business investments are now overwhelmingly software; it doesn't take massive infusions of capital to make your business more efficient, because efficiency gains are achieved through acquiring a copy of an infinite resource -- software.
Sure software vendors can create artificial scarcity through licensing fees, but competitive market pressures will keep those down, and the floor of software fees is very low. As a result there has been less demand for money than there has been in the past. Hence lower interest rates. (Aging populations and slowing population growth also drive interest rates down.)
In other words, cheap money is an implication of the software-driven world we live in, not some sort of moral failing. It's not the result of policymakers doing something with punchbowls to prop up governments or whatever dumb metaphor gets thrown around.
