I mean, from your own link, those error bars come from:
The data being a clustered sample set,
That study wasn't specifically asking whether or not respondents were virgins, ie, had 0 sex partners.
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The error bars there are large because the actual question was 'how many sex partners have you had in the past however many years?', and then your linked post explains how this particular dataset/survey/study was then presented to try to show the answer to a question that wasn't explicitly asked.
That can have a lot more variance than a survey/study that flatly asks binary question of 'have you ever had sex before?', and then goes on to define what does and doesn't count as 'having sex'.
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And indeed when you actually do that kind of approach, there are many other graphs from many other studies showing it being increasingly for both young men and young women to be virgins, have had 0 sex partners.
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/26924-nearly-1-in-3-young-men-in-the-us-report-having-no
https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/dstr/index.html
All of these show a marked decline in the number of both young men and young women who have ever had sex, that more people remain sexless for longer, to an older age.
(Though this started earlier among men and is more pronounced, women are now catching up as well)
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Also worth noting:
Compared to adult participants in the 2009 survey, adults in the 2018 group were significantly more likely to report no penile-vaginal intercourse in the prior year, the researchers found. Study participants were also significantly less likely to report engaging in any other sexual behaviors examined in the study, such as oral sex or anal sex. All modes of past-year partnered sex were reported by fewer people in the 2018 cohort.
Yeah, contrary to the implication of OP's image... no, young men are not having more of some other kind of sex than male/female p/v, but still having some other kind of sex.
They're just not having sex with a partner. At all.
Bros are not en masse becoming gay or bi or pan or trans, and then having 'non-traditional' sex that would make them not virgins in a 'non-traditional' way, not in the numbers you'd need to make that a statistically viable explanation for lack of m/f p/v sex.
This is funny haha meme joke, but its not based in reality, its based in whimsy.
You can check that against male self-id rates as LGBTQ and see that there has been a slow, gradual rise, from about 3% up to about 5% for men right now... but nothing like an 8% to 28% rise in roughly the same time period.
This one particular graph having error bars does not mean this is not a real thing that is happening.
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And in case its relevant, I am a queer guy who has had varying kinds of sex and intimacy with both men and women, trans-inclusive.
Not meaning to be rude with this phrasing, but uh, I am significantly younger than you, born around the time you graduated HS... and yep, I have the same, gut, "this seems weird" reaction.
I was a terribly bashful nerd in the early/mid 2000s, and even I lost my v-card as either a 16 or 17 yo.
https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/dstr/pdf/YRBS-2023-Data-Summary-Trend-Report.pdf
Thats a drop from half of kids literally fucking around in HS, to just a third, in only the last 10ish years.
I dunno if such data exists going back to when you were in HS, I'd imagine it would have been closer to around 6/10 back then (though thats just a spitball guess), but yeah, the decline has been shocking to me as well.
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IMO, the main thing that is destroying mental health is... and again, I say this as an early tech adopter, tech nerd, who had a mySpace account, who was one of the first with a Facebook account...
The cause of this is mutlifactorial, general economic decline and precarity are huge factors, but the main problem is our modern social media based digital environment, and how it trains people to act.
Brainrot is a real thing, short form video content reduces attentions spans, makes you more anxious, less confident / have lower self esteem, rapidly propagates mis and disinformation, promotes narcissism and just literally retards rhe development of functional social behaviors.
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That, and the destruction of 'third places', and then the subsequent enshittificstion of dating apps.
In your day, people could afford to go take a car and hangout somewhere they had some privacy, away from their parents at least, some area where people would go and hang out and just socialize.
Those physical spaces do not exist anymore, they all have paywalls people can no longer afford.
No average kid can afford a car on a summer job anymore.
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Then, as things digitized, realworld meetups and hangout areas began to decline, dating apps happened.
They were good for a time, but then the people running them realized that you actually make more money as a dating app by making it something you keep coming back to, hiding people you may actually jive well with behind paywalls, that what you actually want is to create a rollercoaster of 'almost worked out but didn't in the end' type relstionships... as that produces your most reliable dating app customer.
These are smart data science people running these things, they know what they're doing.
They don't say what I just said outloud, because it would be bad for their branding and marketing.