Did new hires get heavly trained by companies in the past?

In my experience, in the past, there was never much training, but there were jobs without a lot of qualifications that provided opportunities to learn.

There are two fundamental ways I know to deal with overly specific job ads that may or may not be intended to fit a particular person. Assuming this is about the US job market.

#1 is to apply to companies that are not so picky. The average college graduate's salary in 2023 is said to be $50-60K. Companies that pay programmers this take what they can get and deal with it. Not exactly Dunder Mifflin, but "tech" companies that are if anything less glamorous or whose heyday was 40 years ago. You may not get fulfillment out of your work any more than money. But if you choose carefully, you can get job security nearly as good as working for the government.

#2 is to be the specific person the job description is written for. Assuming you don't have any connections, nepotism, &c working for you, the way (that I know of) you get to be that special person is by temping for a company or government agency and quickly becoming indispensable to the point they start worrying about you leaving.

There was a time, maybe 50 yrs ago, when large companies would train you after you got out of high school but they expected you to be with the company for many years so it was worth it for them. That changed. Companies are less likely to keep you as an employee for a long time. They are more likely to lay an employee off that in the past. So companies are lass likely to train you.

In terms of job ads, companies are always putting in all kinds of requirements hoping that they will find someone that meets them but they know that it's very unlikely for them to find the exact candidate. If you meet the general requirements it's worth applying if you like the job. It's like any match. You want the perfect match but eventually you will just have to settle with what's available.

Sometimes the ads are deviously trying to fit only one person that is already known and wanted, but an open recruitment process is required, eg by law.

It’s always been this way. One often sees a requirement for (say) 3 years of X where X has only been around for a year at most.

Yeah, ignore the recruiter-speak; few, if any, know what they're procuring without some sort of engineering oversight!

When I started at IBM in 1990 you could get your foot in the door with basic experience, i.e. a college degree could get you an entry level role in a software lab (you’d need a CS degree to get a programming role in such a lab). I worked with people who'd started fresh out of high school and had worked their way up, with IBM providing training in various fields.

By the time I left in 2001, on the job training was very much in the past, and new hires were expected to have all of the skills from day one. So, it's not new, but it’s not how things were until the last twenty years or so (excluding Silicon Valley which always seemed to have higher expectations for lower skilled roles).