The pool of competition is significantly larger than this for “white collar” jobs like accounting, software development and QA, and graphic design.
In the 90’s, remote work was still uncommon. For the most part, people lived near their office.
In the 2000’s, remote work became more common. This grew the pool of candidates for a given job exponentially. I could hire someone working halfway around the world for any number of tasks. I worked for a company based in Irvine, CA and had development and QA team members in turkey, argentina, mexico, minnesota, and atlanta. This was never a problem for me as genX because I started my career and got experience competing against a smaller pool of candidates. Back then, jobs were found in the newspaper. This greatly reduced the number of candidates for a given job.
People starting their careers now face a much more difficult task. The pool of candidates is global and jobs are easily found via linkedin and indeed. Most applicants are filtered out systemically without even being seen by human eyes. I understand the frustration of people in the starting blocks of their careers.