I don’t believe that’s the case. Every potential employer I’ve ever interviewed with (that I didn’t personally know beforehand) has always been extremely vague about why they passed on my candidacy. The most common reasons given were “not senior enough”, “not a good fit”, or “went with a different candidate”. I don’t think that this is a legal reason not to hire someone, but then again I’m a game designer and not a lawyer. My understanding of the law is extremely limited.

I honestly don’t know why it is the way it is - it’s been this way for longer than my career at the very least. My guess is that putting such a high bar of qualifications on the job description serves as an initial test to weed out those applicants who don’t care very much about the work, don’t know much about game dev, or don’t feel confident enough in their skills to apply. We lose out on some good applicants as a result of this policy, but we already get (and must reject) more candidates than we can hire by several orders of magnitude.

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