There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I know they likely won't be able to solve in the interview because I want to see how they think about things. The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's going to take a good while for them to on-board. For us, it usually takes about year to get them to the point that they can contribute without some form of handholding. However, that also mostly holds true for seniors coming to us from other industries.

Well, the lacking passion could be explained because the most known tech companies aren't very attractive. They intentionally obfuscate any technology, restrict access and disallow experimentation.

If you want to leech on the crowd that likes tinkering, you shouldn't give them some shitty iOS/Android environment and call it a day. For the industry, tinkering has become a security problem, scary warning boxes about unverified code being run on a piece of metal. How horrible! It is old and stagnant and just not that interesting.

There are some alternative venues instead, but they have a focus elsewhere.