Well to see it from the perspective from the inside: we always have hundreds of openings, and I've seen openings for months and years without suitable candidates. Sometimes lots of bad applicants and sometimes no applicants at all.
That's for the niche openings. For regular graduate stuff new people start every single day.
It's hard to match up that with the fact that some people apparently aren't getting a single application progressed.
It's weird because everywhere I've ever worked routinely hires people who don't even know how to make a commit, or anything at all really.
For some reason even those people are somehow jumping ahead of competent people like you in the queue. It's also annoying for us because we have to deal with the bad ones that HR delivers.
It's not your fault, but it sounds like you and probably a lot of other people were misled about what having a degree actually does.
The most important thing someone looks at when you apply for a job is that you are interested in the thing and capable of doing it. The degree doesn't really do that but the personal projects do. The degree might be a nice to have on top and helps to convince some people, but you always end up working with people without one anyway.
"most" open source project contributors are looking for work? Lol ok bud
Yeah there are obviously unfortunate cases. But to put another unsourced number out there I would say 90% of open source maintainers are employed in some way or even directly to work on that thing.
The point of bringing it up is that those people would gladly give a pass on an interview to someone they already know contributes than some random graduate they don't know.