alt Hacker NewsAgain, in my experience, that simply never happened, at least not with regard to junior positions.
During COVID we were struggling to retain good developers that just couldn't deal with the full-remote situation[1], and afterwards, there was a lull in recent graduates.
Again, this is from a EU perspective.
[1] While others absolutely thrived, and, yeah, we left them alone after the pandemic restrictions ended...
Huh. It sounds like your perspective isn't just EU focused but N=1, based solely on your company.
The post-pandemic tech hiring boom was well documented both at the time and retrospectively. Lots of resources on it available with a quick web search.