[ghaff]

It's not a great tech job market generally. (Was talking to someone knowledgable yesterday and we basically agreed it's not dot-bomb nuclear winter but more like 2008, although different.)

However, the scenario described in the post (that's somewhat backed in some of the comments here) is that it's become easy enough to apply to hundreds or even a thousand or more jobs that companies are forced to apply very simple heuristics or "AI" filters (which is pretty much the same thing) to deal with the volume. This means that, for a given job, you have a near-zero chance of winning the lottery to even talk to a person.

Therefore, your only chance is pretty much to have a direct path to a human (but, because it's not a great market, that's far from a guarantee either).