I call those a step down.
First, saying that young players who left should not have been played over is nothing but speculation. No one knows how Redd, for example, was practicing or how ready he is to play. Soles received quite a bit of snaps. Maybe Redd saw Soles and Smith ahead of him. Who knows? Not any posters here.
As for the starters, it was a bad year on the field. That does not help. The NIL era is still relatively new, so we don’t yet know what will truly be commonplace. I would imagine there are a number of reasons. We could speculate ad naseum, and surely will, but it does not matter. It is probably good some left. We just don’t know which.
Justin Roger played many minutes for Auburn. I think he was in regular rotation. Cedric Dort played and started some at Wisconsin. David Wahlabaugh has done well, I think, at Syracuse. The DB who transferred to Pitt did well. After he got healthy, Keaton Wade got snaps at Colorado and was doing well, I think, at season’s end.