You're imagining IP to be things like the coca-cola recipes, but the reality is much more complex than that especially in tech where the valuable IP is learnings.
Say you ran the marketing campaign at X and through extensive testing you discovered what works in the space X is in, now you go to competitor Y. Are you going to cleanse your brain of everything you learnt at X or are you going to apply the learnings at Y ?
The reality is the reason Y hired you is to get the learnings that you got from X, what you learnt could save them years of work and reduce the competitive edge that X has.
The exact same thing applies to developers. Say you built a ML model for driving cars at Google and now you're working for Apple on a similar project. You're not going to copy and paste the code you built at Google but you're 100% not going to go down the dead-ends that Google went down because you know they don't work.
The issue is with lumping all learnings and knowledge transfer with protectable intellectual property that belongs to someone. (Hence the "property" part.)
Of course there's overlap. But the issue that people have with non-competes (especially broad ones) is that they effectively try to limit all knowledge transfer that may benefit a competitor directly or indirectly. Especially when this gets to a point of prohibiting people from working in a given profession or role for anyone else without any compensation, this seems wrong.
Say you ran the marketing campaign at X and through extensive testing you discovered what works in the space X is in, now you go to competitor Y. Are you going to cleanse your brain of everything you learnt at X or are you going to apply the learnings at Y ?
The reality is the reason Y hired you is to get the learnings that you got from X, what you learnt could save them years of work and reduce the competitive edge that X has.
The exact same thing applies to developers. Say you built a ML model for driving cars at Google and now you're working for Apple on a similar project. You're not going to copy and paste the code you built at Google but you're 100% not going to go down the dead-ends that Google went down because you know they don't work.