It was the first six months of searching.
I didn't know that now half of the vacancies in our "region" for my profile are phantoms.
They forgot to remove it, brazenly left it as a placeholder for a future vacancy, the whole department that was on maternity leave collectively decided to leave maternity leave, in fact the job is in a neighboring district of the region (or even in another country)...
Got used to it — like in 2017: dug around, found the closest match by skills, interviewed, got a pat on the back, started the grind.
Had to learn to be cheeky.
It didn't help.