While this is true that the stack and domain does not matter for any capable software engineer, most jobs are for hiring particular narrow specialists, requiring the years of experience in a particular framework, and even experience working on an exact same product but in a different company.
One would say, unemployed with a good local language skills will be able to easier navigate bureaucracy and claim more benefits - more loss for the state :)
I mean, when you have already proven that you are net positive for the state, and continue doing so, requiring you to pass some exams is not rational. PR != citizenship. Will I have a bit difficulty buying some groceries in a local market? Maybe, but that shouldn't bother the state.
Also, you can live permanently without PR. PR unlocks some additional perks, which again, have nothing to do with linguistics.
Permanent residency is a business deal between two entities: an individual and a state. It has nothing to do with linguistics. There are many Germans permanently living in Vietnam, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, who never bothered to even learn how to say Hello, not to mention any certificate or exam...
Creating high-quality native desktop apps became a forgotten art, so people/shops are flocking to TUIs even for the local (i.e. not remote shells) work.
One would say the tests (and job interviews) should have been designed with the original intent of testing candidates AS IS, i.e. preparing specifically for such tests should have been considered as cheating... But at some point it turned into prep gymnastics, and measuring how desperate the candidates are.
Not at all. I mean, regardless of him not having a fancy web page or an Instagram, he is anyway an Internet geek celebrity we all know and respect. My point is that I believe there are many similar but noname engineers whose achievements stayed and will stay behind corporate proprietary walls.
An opinion: there were (and are) many great unknown engineers behind proprietary corporate projects. FFmpeg and QEMU became famous because these are open-source projects, not because nothing similar was done before (it was done, but in the proprietary world).