Get hired. Go through onboarding. Collect your hiring bonus. Get a few weeks for your first project and fail at it. It gets written off as "they're just new here". Use some "unlimited" vacation time. Get more projects and keep failing at them. Get put on a new team because the eng director wants to give you another chance, and repeat the whole process. Eventually get put on a PIP. Show no improvement at the end of it. Accept a severance in exchange for "resigning" and signing an NDA/liability waiver.

At a large company it is possible for this entire process to draw out for 3-6 months, and you collecting >$100K in in that period.

The reality is that most developers are bad at their jobs.

Also, there's the "fake it till you make it" thinking.

Most places have such chaotic onboarding that it would take a few months to truly get signal that the employee knew nothing.

In my ten years I’ve never worked at a place where pairing was the norm. I would love to experience that kind of culture

That's assuming the interview process tests for job performance with any sort of accuracy.

In most cases in corporations you are not interviewed by people you will be working with. Interview stage is a generic assessment by random people. Yo simply need to pass them. Also they are usually asking questions not related to the real job.

If it’s remote, sometimes they’ll pay someone else to do the work and pocket the difference. And/or the job may just be a ruse to get credentials in the org because it’s an espionage target or to use as a launch point to go after an espionage target.

You're making the (large) assumption that the interviews are actually relevant to the position.