Please help, will pay for legitimate advice on a call?

I know a lot of people that make the choice to exaggerate their resumes, but they also understand that they are hurting all of their peers who are being honest. This is the reason why YOE requirements keep increasing and entry level jobs say "4 years of experience required". They are getting candidates from bootcamps who exaggerate their experience, e.g. "worked for 1 year at OSLabs" - with letters of reference - who largely don't pass interviews. The engineering hiring managers get upset at the recruiters for letting these people through who aren't qualified and the recruiters raise the YOE requirement on the job postings. Seen this with many companies, exact same pattern, and some of them just don't interview bootcamp grads anymore as a result. It's a cycle that screws everyone else over but it's happening because plenty of people have "loosey goosey morals".

Yeah the whole industry has this problem, and it's not Codesmith causing the entire thing. A very common pattern is people who have "3 years of self employed contracting" when they were just on Upwork and never even had a single contract. Or they did volunteer work that they call "contracting work". I've seen everything under the sun and talk to my friends a lot about it. The way most Codesmith alumni portray their experience though is by the one that triggers most people and makes then have a negative view of Codesmith. "scam", "liars", "no integrity" are words used. The weakness in the approach is that all the code is public and anyone can read it - very few do - and those that do see how embarrassing it can be to portray those projects as months/1+ years of "experience". You're right that it is what it is is, and the industry and the market will adjust. It's why DS&A is prevalent at top companies - it normalizes the evaluation and gives everyone a shot to prove their skills as individuals and not as "Codesmith grads" or "self taught" or "Harvard grad"