In production and manufacturing, there are step-by-step books of what to do to make a factory run in a 'world-class' style. Yet, companies don't buy the cheap book, instead they pay lots of money for people to fix it.
While I know it's a bit apples and oranges between code and manufacturing, there's a set guideline of how to solve issues and problems, it's not a dark art that no-one knows about, is all I was trying to get towards.
Yeah, I think one of the issues that's starting to plague tech/coding (again, perspective of another outsider who has been in academia) is basically the competency crisis because you can't just test for IQ.
At the entry levels, being incompetent is fine because hopefully the 22-year-old isn't touching serious stuff and incompetence is somewhat expected. Sure, take this code and make X work. If you're retarded, you can't or shouldn't progress.
I am sure the programs listed in that recruiter's letter--as gross and extractive and entitled as it is--train their students to think first, solve the problem, assess if the solution could be more efficient, re-solve, and also make sure it doesn't break anything else. This is actually something that (sometimes) gets taught in good math programs, hence partially why CS and Math have such overlap. The upper levels--more autonomous levels--are more akin to creation than production.
It, to me, seems more like answering a story prompt with a ton of conditions than actually producing anything. For the author, "Okay, write a story with a white dog and a green balloon for six-year-olds that triggers sadness." There are an infinite number of ways to do this well, and yet most people are going to struggle to produce something passable. The guidelines for writing are taught in countless language and creative writing programs, and yet our masterworks (frequently written for children, no less) are still a minimum of 50 years old despite society's much greater educational attainment. Some things can't be taught.
I think coding/tech's way of creating good processes is (or was supposed to be) SWOT, AGILE, etc., but formalized write-review-share feedback-edit-repeat doesn't work if the person is neither curious nor intelligent.