Let's be honest, the alternative to having an open hiring process, i.e. resumes, is nepotism and hiring your chums and the chums of your contacts. Which does describe the hiring process in a lot of startups. Ethical issues aside, the problem with this is that it shrinks the pool of potential hires down drastically, to people who look like you, think like you, and know roughly the same things as you. Great if your customers also fit into this bracket, not so great if they don't.

However I think the OP drastically underestimates the proportion of wholly unqualified on paper people who apply for most jobs. I'd put it at 50% for most and up to 90% for some. So you can see why people go down the nepotism + chums route.

As someone who has a deeply weird CV and life experiences / social circle that is pretty much orthogonal to most techies it can be difficult, as the nepotism / chums route is not available. But just writing a cover letter to the JD and company gets me a fair way usually.