One underrecognized effect of all this (speaking from personal experience) is the fatigue that all the red tape generates. The closer you get to residency, the worse the paperwork/bureaucracy load gets.
Eventually you get jaded enough and tired of it that you'd rather just go home than keep begging a place that clearly doesn't want you to let you in.
As someone that works in a team with minimal collaboration software overhead—is there a ton of bloat in their process (Basecamp this, Campfire that, etc.) or is that just the reality of modern software development?
As a hiring manager, boilerplate cover letters written in what I can only describe as the human version of ChatGPT tone already make me want to claw my eyes out, so I'm sure this will only help.
Am I misaligned with what the larger job market wants to see from a cover letter, or is all the advice given to kids on how to write a cover letter terrible?
Not disagreeing with your vague intuitions but just the point you made about shipping incomplete features and fixing them on the fly. You don't need reliable insider information to know that's what they're doing—you just need to download the Twitter app and watch the verified/official checks changing right in front of you.
How can you characterize Twitter's current modus operandi under Musk as anything but "let's just ship it, we'll fix it later"? They're on iteration 5 or 6 of the checkmarks within the last week.
Eventually you get jaded enough and tired of it that you'd rather just go home than keep begging a place that clearly doesn't want you to let you in.