Having worked as a low level manager at places that are "metrics driven", what I have seen is that teams are given average metrics for the team to hit that are legitimately roughly between the output of a senior and junior engineer. What happens next is that when anyone below this average, i.e. all the juniors, it would show up on a graph and I would be tasked with "fixing" their stats to be above average. Rinse and repeat this cycle a few times and suddenly were not hiring any juniors or the job postings say "Junior" but describe a senior.

This is for software engineering which is a in demand field, I can't imagine how bad it would be for a field where there was a glut of people trying to apply