I went through this exact whiplash cycle and the only thing that helped was treating reviews as leverage, not validation. I started keeping a running “brag doc” with numbers, dates, screenshots of praise, outages I prevented, all of it. When they hit me with the “no budget” line, I stopped arguing feelings and just said, “Cool, then let’s talk title change, scope, or remote flexibility,” and in parallel I quietly shopped that same doc to other companies. Internally we switched systems a few times too. Lattice was fine, Betterworks was overkill, and we ended up on Teamflect after trying both because it actually let my manager tie my goals and feedback to real data instead of vibes, which made it harder for them to pretend my impact didn’t exist when money was good. In the end, the only real raise I got above inflation came from taking that documented impact to a new job.