The world is divided into people who have direct and recent experience of adoption in close proximity (in their family or close friends, or through work, for example) and those who don't. Those who don't typically retain naively positive views of it in a 'happy ending for all concerned, love conquers all' kind of a way. I leaned towards that view myself before we started in our own adoption journey, although due to a number of adverse events in my own life I was not quite so naive about it. In an ideal world, adoption would never be necessary because it creates trauma in itself. In the world in which we live, it is the least-bad way forward for too many children and families and it can be very positive in many ways for a great number of families. But it is incredibly complicated and young age at point of removal from birth family/ subsequent adoption does not in any way mean things are simple.
Anyway - obviously, there is no child in 2026 who ends up in a position to be adopted who hasn't suffered significant trauma. It's a relatively common situation for a birth mum to have had one or more children removed, and then to become pregnant again (sometimes multiple times). In those situations, children can be removed more or less at birth as social services are already involved and will be monitoring the pregnancy, and preparing the legal paperwork ready to remove the new child. So that is the most extreme version of 'how would the child have bad memories', and it's pretty common.
Two things:
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almost no birth mother in that situation will have had an easy, uncomplicated and stress-free pregnancy in which they took care of themselves and the unborn baby well. The usual battle is to try and keep a birth mother clean of drugs and alcohol during this period; even where they are not a factor, it's likely that whatever other issues (the birth mother's own trauma, mental health or life situation, domestic violence, etc etc) the birth mother is experiencing will result in a pregnancy drowning in stress hormones. So the child can be deeply affected by what has happened to them in utero, even with A1 care from the time they are removed from birth mum (although in many cases anyway even if removed at birth they will not only experience a degree of trauma from being removed from birth mum, but also they will be settled with a primary carer who is a foster carer for N weeks or months and then once again removed from all they know and settled with an adoptive family - that's a lot of loss and I'm sure all you birth parents reading this would expect your 2 month old baby to notice if you went away and were replaced by a random person!)
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more fundamentally though, the child will grow up knowing they are adopted and were removed from everything they knew. This frequently causes massive issues psychologically and with identity
.. and that's before you get into any genetic susceptibility to any underlying conditions or problems which contributed to birth parents' inability to provide adequate care for a child, which the child can therefore inherit (nature vs nurture argument). For example, predispositions to learning difficulties, learning disabilities, neurodivergence and mental health issues (no, I'm not suggesting that neurodivergent people can't parent, I'm suggesting that it can be one factor in many contributing to inability to parent, for some people. Neurodivergence is hugely over represented in previously looked after children. Some of this is likely to be that trauma creates similar effects on the brain and neurological system to neurodivergent conditions, and some of likely to be the fact that neurodivergence is overrepresented in birth parents whose children are removed, and there is a strong genetic element to most neurodivergent conditions. Again, I'm not suggesting neurodivergent = bad parent, we all know there is a spectrum of different presentations).
In previously looked after children i.e. those who have been in care and grown through it, or in care for a while and then adopted, the rates of everything negative are massively higher than the general population. They are (a lot) more likely to end up with every negative life outcome possible from prison to mental health issues unfortunately up to and including suicide, hugely vulnerable to being victims of abuse of all kinds as teenagers and adults, and less likely to end up with any degree of positive outcomes. And that's despite the fact that becoming an adoptive parent is like the Hunger Games, designed to weed out people who don't really really want it, and actively excluding people over whom social workers have any doubt about motivation, capablity or resilience. Therefore on average adoptive parents are more able to cope than non-adoptive parents. Yet their children still have much worse outcomes despite their best efforts. That tells you how serious the damage done to babies and young children is, and that the effects are lifelong.
So no, it's not at all a surprise (very sadly) to hear of your own experience with your friends.