I don't have recruiting experience in the field on either side in the past 5 years and likely am in a different country anyway, but from what you wrote I'd tend

I don't have recruiting experience in the field on either side in the past 5 years and likely am in a different country anyway, but from what you wrote I'd tend to believe that your selection of companies you applied to was a bit unlucky/wrong. Try smaller companies that aren't 100% IT focused so they have no pressure to hire rock stars to fix their issues with their 800 mediocre software engineers.