I am an Indian graduate who has decent experience with actual programming, even contributed to open source, and yet struggled to get a job in between my peers who have done 300 Leetcode problems and nothing else.

So I assume the hiring meter for most juniors is not "can use version control" or "can architect a 1000 line codebase with decent OOP". It's "can recurgigate 300-500 common Leetcode problems and can cheat in online coding tests". We are all in a bubble.