I worked for a company that kept one job posting open for more than 4 years. They've used it to hire more than 100 people, but unless you worked there you wouldn't know.
And also I've been in places like you describe, where one generic "Software Engineer" job posting is reused to hire many people into many teams, since they're all "Software Engineers" so they just recycle the same posting for everyone.
It varies a lot depending on HR culture.