It was, it was just hard to do at scale by a lot of different people.

LLMs and other automation tools make things that used to be annoying but uncommon to a steady part of life.

It was, but in a different form. This is the first I've heard of a random recruiter bonus.

Companies often work with more than one job search agency but there they hired people to find someone - and they often found the same people. There was some incentive to find a good candidate as a bad reputation means you don't get hired to find the next.

I did have recruiters yell at me because I applied for the same job via multiple different recruiters. As if it was my problem to figure that out.

Finding a job when you don't know someone already there has always been a mess for both sides.