I'm an American and I haven't really had this problem. My career trajectory is weird in that I did systems and networks (with lots of automation because I'm lazy), then SRE, and now development.

I get headhunters calling me weekly. I was able to take a low stress medium pay job for a few years to recharge and moved right back into a faster paced good paying job within weeks of deciding I was ready for it. I don't know what jobs these folks are applying for but I very rarely see those "10 years experience in 2 year old language" jobs these days. A few years back they were all over the place, though.

Can't say for the US but the situation got erratic nowadays, sensible people and outrageous assholes may sit in offices next floor to eachother.

Also the "pay for our course and get 3k/hr job in three months" courses make it harder for an employer to distinguish who's who, which makes getting the job harder for honest novices.

It looks like percentage of requests for experienced developers in the last three years had grown a lot, so I'd say it gets worse for newcomers :( which is bad because how are we going to get new experienced people if we refuse to give them experience

It exists but it’s an exaggeration. Most companies are not like that. I also had a job lined up before graduating with my bachelor’s. I live in California.

There's a shortage of programmers — of all IT professions — in Australia, so wages here are pretty high

I went back to college to get a 2 year degree in networking. Part of the degree program required landing a paid internship. I interned at a bank at which they frequently hire their interns (and even the director first started there as an intern) but right when they had to decide whether or not to hire me Silicon Valley Bank went under and it became a very bad time to be a regional bank, so i was infotmed 1 month before graduation that they would not be hiring me on. So 2-3 weeks of intense job hunting and interviewing later I landed my current job for about twice what we were told we should make immediately after graduation with much better benefits than the bank could have ever offered me.

So to answer your question: maybe? The jobs are out there but you do have to be ready to put in some work to interview well to land a good one