> The desire for a 'good candidate' and the paranoia about making a mistake is sounding increasingly utopian.

I don't know where you're getting your 'perfect hire narrative' idea from; this is simple cost/benefit analysis. If making a bad hire is a lot more expensive than failing to make a good hire (and I'm pretty sure it is by a factor of at least several times - failing to make a good hire is really cheap), then you choose to make the cheap mistake of not hiring instead of the expensive mistake.

This is about as far from utopianism or looking for the 'perfect hire' as you can get. It's all about finding enough 'good enough' hires, while avoiding expensive mistakes.