Do not get me started FUCK linkedin FUCK web development we weren't supposed to make COMPUTERS anyway

I kid you not i put out some 300 applications... 2 (TWO) rejections, both of which i was not certified in said required software stack, expected. And two false lead contacts, both wanted me to stop searching for jobs but wouldn't give a date for an interview for over a week, one was for a community college.

I returned to unspecified manufacturing, I'm in a really weird spot, and layoffs just started. I dread returning to the market

Not quite sure what it is, but I'm sensing a bit of tension here OP, how's the job hunt?

HR is the bane of progress. HR is there for only one purpose, to keep the company from receiving lawsuits. It does not matter if the person they hire is competent, convivial, corrigible, or even capable of just showing up. They only pay attention to whether it follows their departments' regulated practices.

In hiring, HR is called upon to select someone, from a pool of sometimes thousands of candidates, based first on their resume/CV, a document broadly expected to be full of lies and exaggeration, (which increases likelihood of hiring someone dishonest) and which can have no visible indications of what the applicant can actually do, then based on an/a series of interviews, a practice which only tests the candidate's ability to bullshit/be charming for short formalized conversations. (increasing likelihood of selecting for neurotypicality or unreasoning confidence) No HR person knows enough about essentially anything else anyone does to actually be able to tell the difference between a beam collimator and a retroencabulator, and staffing agencies make it even less likely because they are even further from the work.

I applied for an internal position in November. They still haven't put together an interview committee. I fucking hate this

Many countries started mass immigration after the global inflation caused by global QE and money supply growth, in order to prevent wage inflation. They did this mass immigration just as central banks were raising rates to cool the economy.

This is likely what you are feeling, there was a small time when there was a labor shortage and all the talk of 'quiet quitting' before they started this scheme, as depicted by the phillips curve, now its too many workers fighting for too few jobs as high interest rates slowed things down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve