[Beltalowda]

Companies like Google (and similar) are kind of the exception; I'm starting a job next week, and I had an initial video call for almost all jobs I applied for when searching. Sometimes I wrote a cover letter, often I don't. My CV is decent enough, but not uniquely "oh wow!"-type of impressive. I don't think I was filtered out of thousands of applicants in ~90% of the cases.

While remote positions can certainly receive a lot of "noise applicants", as I discovered in my last job, you can filter out half, if not more, on just a quick pass. Most companies are dealing with dozens of candidates at the most, often less. Certainly not thousands of them.