This means that they inflate programmer salaries, which makes it impossible for most companies that could benefit from software development to hire developers.
We could probably have five times as many software developers as we have now, and they would not be out of work; they would only decrease average salaries for programmers.
Why would this be the case? Many programmers join Google or Meta (or similar tier companies) and immediately double or triple their income. Software salaries are famously bimodal and people often transition from the lower mode to the higher mode practically overnight.
In fact (and I'm not an economist) I conjecture that the lower mode exists because the upper mode exists. That is, people purposefully don't really care what their salary is (i.e. don't put upward wage pressure) when they're at lower-mode companies because they know one day they'll make the leap to the upper-mode. In other words, the fact that Google-tier companies pay well allows other companies to pay poorly because those guys are just padding their resumes to get a 350k job at Google and don't really care whether Bank of Nowhere pays them $90k or $110k.
When I started a CS degree in 2003, we were still kinda in the "dot com crash has happened, no-one will ever hire a programmer again" phase, and there were about 50 people in my starting class. I think in the same course two years ago, there'd been about 200. The 'correct' number, for actual future demand, was certainly closer to 200 than 50, and the industry as a whole had a bit of a labour crunch in the early 10s in particular.