Funnily enough me and my peers usually end up watching Khan Academy videos anyway since they do a way better job of explaining topics than university content.

Mayhaps by design. Who would you rather hire to run through an obstacle course? One who has a certificate of having run a course of hoops for 4 years, or one that looks fit enough to run it? Arguably both may work. Can you measure which one is more likely to cost you your job? Depending on your obstacle course you may be looking for more specific qualifiers.

Bingo. If I graduated in the last two years, I would have gone to work at a grocery store while taking a couple core classes online while I waited for colleges to get back to normal

I was surprised how low this theory was in both the article and in this comment section! The article even opens with talking about the trend continuing fall 2020 (the first school year that began since the shutdowns hit the US), and yet it takes almost halfway down the article to mention "remote learning" and then another big chunk before the word "pandemic" is used (I didn't see "virus" or "COVID" either before then). I'm not saying all the other issues discussed in the article and elsewhere in this comment section aren't there, but given the timeline I feel like any convincing theory has to first address why that isn't the dominant factor.

While hiring for junior software devs, I found that degrees were next to worthless. People coming in with a long list of qualifications but somehow can't answer the most basic questions about the stuff they are certified in.

I found people who did self directed online learning combined with having some projects to show in the resume were the best and had real world experience rather than having memorized a hundred java design patterns from the 90s.