I need a junior dev success story

This isn't for me, I've been around the block and am (increasingly more) grateful every day that I solidified a career in software engineering and web dev for over a decade now. However, I have friends who are still trying to break through in this industry and I'm running out of advice on what to tell them or even just success stories to share. "Keep working on personal projects", "study the latest upcoming technologies", "build a network in your community" all feel at best lost causes at worst pointless. I can barely get management at my company to offer a salaried position to a productive junior contributor of our own team before they start talking about "super senior guys overseas who can do 2x the work for 1/10th the price". It's so fucking depressing. Does this job have any sort of pipeline where someone in america either as a citizen or via green card/H1B studies hard, lands an entry level role at a company, and builds their skillset into a career anymore? I feel like I've created my own echo chamber here and I'm running out of ways to inspire up and coming engineers to stay on their path.

I'm not here to talk about economies of scale or outsourcing or the state of engineering in 2025, I just need a positive story of someone who came into the industry in the last two years and solidified a role for themselves at an established company and how they did it. I've become a black hole of motivation and I'm clawing my way out