Well... I think that completely depends on the market you're in. I was pretty much forced to hire inexperienced developers because we had hard deadlines, lack of devs and a lack of available, good developers. Of course this, really messed with the quality and long term maintainability, but the investors mostly ignored that part.
The cost is in the near future and fixed, whereas the benefit is in the future. Which is why a company can't answer those questions, and often goes with the safe route and tries to poach or hire a senior person (which, honestly, is just a junior person who has made mistakes and learned on someone else's dime).
However that has its own risks because it's not like interviews are cost free.
I just think there's a tremendous market flaw that someone is going to take advantage of by finding talented entry level folks and hiring them for less and then making money somehow. That or eventually entry level folks will leave the profession of software development.
I suspect there will be another winnowing of software development jobs. However, we aren't back at the dot com days when it felt like there was so much demand that hiring standards fell. If anything it feels like hiring standards (match all of these technologies and your experience must have been at scale) are higher than they have been in the past. (Could just be an artifact of the jobs I have applied to in the past vs recently.)