> Pat yourself on the back and mutter “you need to be skilled and lucky to work here”

It would be absolutely amazing if employers and recruiters finally were doing exactly this. We are in this dead end precisely because everyone is under false illusion that their pool of candidates has a hidden gem outshining everybody else in existence, and they absolutely need to sift through the whole pool to find this gem. As a result, all pools are never exhausted and only ever spreading, with more and more desperate people sucked into multiples of them.