They don’t own you. You can quit any time. Especially in M&A situations where uncertainty becomes super high. It’s quite common to provide retention bonuses to key staff whose loss would be demoralizing to the remainder of the company. Something like 2x annual salary if you stay for two more years, vested in stages or at the end.

If you have the skills to program, you can find another job in tech in five minutes. We haven’t seen much of a depression in jobs since the dot-com collapse in the early 2000s.