I think for junior engineers the other thing that's made it much harder is that there is much more near-shoring/off-shoring than there used to be given how much better Zoom etc. are now compared to a decade+ ago, and how everyone is used to remote work.
I've worked with great engineers in Latin American and Eastern Europe, and these days the experience is almost exactly like working with a US-based engineer: they have great English skills, there is plenty of time overlap (especially for LatAm, and in direct contrast to the nightmare that was India offshoring in the mid 00s), and given I pretty much interact with everyone 99% of the time on Zoom/Meet anyway, it doesn't really make a difference to me where the person is.
So it becomes hard to pay a junior dev a US salary when you can get a great senior dev for that amount or less in LatAm or Eastern Europe.
I've worked with great engineers in Latin American and Eastern Europe, and these days the experience is almost exactly like working with a US-based engineer: they have great English skills, there is plenty of time overlap (especially for LatAm, and in direct contrast to the nightmare that was India offshoring in the mid 00s), and given I pretty much interact with everyone 99% of the time on Zoom/Meet anyway, it doesn't really make a difference to me where the person is.
So it becomes hard to pay a junior dev a US salary when you can get a great senior dev for that amount or less in LatAm or Eastern Europe.