And who decides if you have 20 years worth of understanding of algos? A developer with 5 years worth of experience? What less experienced people don't understand is that development is not necessarily a one way path like at FAANGs where you move from level 1 to 2 to 3 to lead to manager to director within 10 years or you're worthless.

For most of the developers, it's not a video game where you just level up. It involves working on projects small and large. A lot of time doing business analysis or some part of project management or documentation or various other things. Many of us work at small or medium sized businesses that don't have problems of scale, but rather problems of complexity.

Also maybe react or some other fad like Kafka or microservices won't come at the beginning, but at a later stage of interviews, even for a junior position, if you have 10+ years experience, I bet you'll be expected to know those things, otherwise "what have you been doing for 10 years?" Solving actual business problems and not inventing things to do so I can put them on my resume, thanks.