Mid level feels harder to break into than entry level was. how do you guys even do it

I genuinely did not expect this to be harder than getting my first job out of college. Entry level I would just apply everywhere and hope someone believes in you. mid level everyone wants a specialist. 4 years of kafka, deep kubernetes background or some specific domain experience. i’m a solid engineer who can learn anything fast but that doesn’t seem to matter as it’s harder to filter in an interview. The market state doesn’t help either. layoffs the past two years pushed a bunch of senior engineers down a level and now they’re competing for the same roles as us. More engineers, same number of jobs. every decent posting has hundreds of applicants within two days. Finding the good roles in the first place is its own problem. linkedin seems to recycle the same posts for weeks. Now I go directly to company career pages that seem to be hiring but after hours of that i find maybe 5 roles worth sending a resume to. then comes the application itself which is its own time investment and most of the time you don’t even hear back. I know entry level has it bad but is mid level just like this now or am I doing something wrong?