what better way to ensure you get CS degreed ppl for positions that legally can't require one than to reproduce the "group project" model as an organizational principle?

CS group projects are biting like pair programming. Most CS group projects I've been on were a game of chicken where everyone would wait for others to do the work. If you don't pull your weight on pair programming it's quickly obvious and you'll get feedback.

At this point I suspect that the "group projects" often done in CS degrees are actually intended to give the student experience in a failed project and learning from their mistakes, and understanding that not every project is a success or failure due to their actions alone.

Kind of backfired for me, because only very rarely were professors able to assign projects that were big enough that I couldn't do them entirely by myself, and I was outright incentivized to do so because even working at that speed I could still produce the whole project at A-grade quality when my teammates would have been satisfied with a B or a C.

Another cynical take would be that you were given perfect training for a software team in industry. Every team tends to have a small number of individuals trying to get that A, while their colleagues are not only satisfied with a B or a C but spend most of their days in meetings trying to ensure they drag down the software to their target.

Same here, I knew I was being exploited, but didn't care.

Those grades and work experience were quite valuable to myself.

In what situations (and jurisdictions) would an employee be legally prevented from requiring a CS degree?

Most, as far as I'm aware, since it's not required to do the work in almost all cases.

I can only speak for the U.S., but "required to actually do the work" has nothing to do with whether or not I'm legally allowed to set a requirement for a job.

There are protected classes/categories that can't be part of the employment decision, but outside of those, the employer is free to set whatever criteria they want for the position.

If I run a plumbing company, I could say "all of our plumbers must have a computer science degree," and I can't imagine there's any legal reason I couldn't do that. I'd certainly have a recruiting problem, but not a legal problem as far as I'm aware.

If the requirement has a disparate impact on one of those protected classes, you can run into problems in the US.

So in the case of plumbers, if a plaintiff can show that you are hiring fewer women because women are less likely to have CS degree—then you would need to show a “demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job” for a CS degree.

However, this isn’t an issue for software developer positions. A CS degree doesn’t have to be absolutely necessary to be able to perform the job, it just needs a demonstrable relationship to the job requirement. There is also already precedent that a degree in a related field does meet that requirement.

That’s not how that works at all. There’s clear precedent that employers are allowed to require specific degrees.

In fact, depending on regulations, it can happen that you end up with somewhat junior team member having to sign off on all materials because they are the only one with necessary accredited title...

For certain (or certain kinds of) positions, yes. That's the "almost all" part.

There’s no problem with requiring a CS degree for every single software developer, software engineer, programmer, or coder job. Since those are the kinds of jobs that were obviously being discussed it’s not “almost all”, it’s essentially none.

The worst group project I did in course of my studies didn't have the same level of forced interaction as pair/mob programming. In fact, I'd say it tended to have less than normal work from the office.