My personal experience is that it's still as hard as before to get qualified engineers. I saw so many candidates who are really just box-drawing warriors or glorified coordinators who couldn't make coherent technical decisions. "Uber leads" who couldn't articulate why a decision was made or the landscape of their domains (by the way, "uber lead" is such a dubious term that signals that a candidate talks more than walk). ML engineers who claimed to build elaborate time series models couldn't explain how to encode time series. Backend engineers who claimed to lead a project of building a distributed file system couldn't explain how their systems manage metadata. Etc etc.