I'd like to know how hard it is for other people starting out these days, what's worked for them. I'm not one to ask as I get hounded by Google/Alphabet recruiters every 3-6 months to co-design a role in entry-management/team-lead (SRM) or SWE/SA-SRE.

I'd suggest focusing on one of Go, Rust, Haskell, Elm or Elixir in addition to the customary C++17 or Java/Kotlin... and get some useful packages up on open repos.