Again, 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.
I never claimed a broad perspective. But I've yet to see a "post-pandemic hiring boom" anywhere in junior-level-IT jobs in the EU, and a quick trip to Google with those exact words turned up nothing either.
