You laugh, but where I live the market for juniors (other than summer internships exclusively for currently enrolled university students) is basically zero right now.
Every company is looking exclusively for seniors or at least mid level. They don't care that someone needs to train juniors in order to become seniors as long as it's someone else who has to do it. Companies can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
So everyone keeps telling me how hot the SW dev market is right now due to all the openings and the high demand, meanwhile I'm only getting rejections because I don't have 3+ YoE in AWS, Kubernetes, Django/Flask, System Design, etc.
This is a problem that a lot of fields have had (e.g. hand-crafted furniture). Technological advances killed the market for juniors but demand for seniors remained. In the short term it's completely fine, but then a few decades later there's not enough new seniors to match demand.
What is the correct quantity of "senior" furniture craftsmen? How do we know there is a shortage? Unless there has been enormous wage inflation in the past few years then I am skeptical of any shortage claims.