Companies dirty secret: Job postings are an invaluable signal generator for companies. Knowing how much demand there is for various positions in your company is super helpful to drive business decisions. And unfortunately the company loses most of the signal when they are candid about just gathering potential applicants (because people will not apply and you know a lot less about their interest and potential)
Not defending being uncandid, just a heads-up to be realistic about what's going on here. Unless it's made outright illegal, just assume it's happening all the time, because of how fantastic the upside is and how cheap it is to do. The amount of work the company has to invests in screening incoming requests is entirely variable and scales to 0 if they really don't want to hire right now.
Most companies, if not nearly all of them, are just really bad at hiring above "entry-level" in general. The practice of pushing hiring through HR teams and recruiters often leads to the job posting being weird catch-all abstractions because a huge funnel brings in lots of resumes, which makes the HR teams look busy.
Really, postings should be astoundingly specific --- literally, "This is exactly what we are looking for and the problem we want to solve. Prove to us you can solve that problem." Generalist hiring teams are usually unable to get that specific, which is why personal references and recommendations are very valuable. The number of applicants you get should be a good sign that your posting is too general or just right. Positions above the junior level should have significantly less applicants. If not, then you can probably simply hire a junior level.
Not defending being uncandid, just a heads-up to be realistic about what's going on here. Unless it's made outright illegal, just assume it's happening all the time, because of how fantastic the upside is and how cheap it is to do. The amount of work the company has to invests in screening incoming requests is entirely variable and scales to 0 if they really don't want to hire right now.