It is pretty universally used to filter out candidates. FAANG pioneered this and maybe for a while you could work in startups without grinding programming challenges, but unfortunately today even startups lean pretty heavily into this.

For a first job in the industry just spam applications. Assuming an acceptable resume that describes technologies you're competent with, and assuming it contains some projects or interesting things that have been built / worked on, some company somewhere will eventually take a flier on you.

Getting interviews after the first job I think is pretty self explanatory. Still spam applications but at that point you've already done this before.

FWIW, when I'm actively looking for work I will apply to maybe 10 or 15 places a day, often with cover letters that sound fairly bespoke (it is pretty easy to customize a generic template in a way that doesn't sound forced). It is not uncommon for me to have applied to 100 places by the time I'm busy enough with interviews to be comfortable stopping the application process.