How I finally got job interviews at Palantir and Dropbox

I see your point about basic programming skill and exposure, but it also doesn't help that often the requirements are inflated somewhat to attract better talent and keep the chaff out. Job seekers learn to discount some of the prerequisites for this reason.

It cuts both ways. A lot of position writeups clearly have way too many bullet points (with arbitrary numbers of years of experience required in each - as if years of experience in X actually means anything), often in trivially learnable and/or transferable skill areas; or are just plain ungrammatical or otherwise incoherent. And then these places wonder why months and months go by with very few people applying.