As someone who had to do similar work for years the answer is that there were no alternatives.
No one takes a shitty job on purpose.
More employees means more HR work, more administrative work, more legal work, more work in general, and unless the benefits of hiring more people are great, they will just abuse the employees at hand.
First you need work two 10 hour shifts a day, 7 days a week to survive. Then you can't even study, because you can't afford it.
This is why proper unemployment and free schools (evil SOCIALISM) comes in to play. People don't need to work themselves to death just to survive, there are safety nets you can fall back on. (Yes there are holes in said nets, but it's better than the gaping black hole the US has).
Turns out there are people who take shitty jobs on purpose, out of a sense of... I don't know, fear, embarrassment, impostor syndrome, or a combination of them.
*This is not in the US.
All of them in this case did, with no families or major expenses to support, and not a weird scam or pyramid scheme, just standard contract development work where in two or three contractually secured months they'd make what they currently do in over a year. The reason is basically geographical, working for clients abroad is just ridiculously more profitable (think Venezuela).
The risk in this case is extremely low, I wasn't looking for referrals either (I'd offered to give it to them if there were any), just genuinely wanted my friends to earn more and work less.