I've been on many interview debriefs where the discussion came down to a question of our team's appetite for taking on a more relatively junior hire vs holding out for a more solid candidate. Some "weaker" hires can be OK, but in order to be fair to them (and the team) you have to make sure you have the resources to develop them by giving them the opportunity to work with more experienced people and get one-on-one mentoring. So yes, the extent that you want to "hire better people" is very much an intentional judgment, and you can calibrate your hiring process accordingly based on your current team composition and the work on your plate.

I wonder if that happens. Some hiring processes are flawed so they filter out the better candidates at the HR levels and the engineers filter out the candidates who are left over. This can go on for a long time until the company is so understaffed they hire anyone and it works out..