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I couldn't agree more! I looked at junior dev jobs that wanted people who contribute often to open source, had awesome side projects, etc. Sounds like they wanted midlevel but only had budget for junior.

Please note, I've never seen your code, so don't take this personally.

That's because they want you to be productive. IME/O, having someone on the team that can't really make an app is antithetical.

You could definitely look for a job in QA and ask them to set you up as a dev, then work on dev in your spare work hours.

I had the same feeling in the beginning. It seemed to me so hard to have the credentials asked by a junior job requirements and felt very discouraged.