I thought it was the same for here (Hong Kong), but after talking with recruiters and HRs: most of them are just people using bots, and they never read the job description. Very few of these big numbers are actually real candidates that have a chance of getting the role.

We are recruiting in Sweden and apparently its very hard finding good candidates. Most are fresh from very short (2 years) educations or other special cases as opposed to having had 4-5 years of university and maybe some experience.

Fun thing though, we recently let a consultant go due to relying too much on LLMs.

This is not true at all. Last year maybe, right now it's better. Still a little harder if you're into dev and one single stack, but still not as catastrophic as you describe

In London, lots of jobs (at least for senior SWEs)

Not true. Things are harder than precovid era but it’s still relatively fine to get a job as software engineer (perhaps except for juniors, but that’s worldwide)