Also, the number of developers is increasing exponentially over time. There are maybe a hundred thousand people out there who have >25 years of dev experience, and millions who have <5. E.g. see [1] - 16 times more engineers filling the SO survey with <5 years of experience compared to >25.

The job market has to roughly follow this demographic trend, otherwise companies would fall behind competitors.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro...