> Idk licensing and regulation sounds like involving more institutional arrogance.

Well it works. Aviation for example is incredibly safe if you think about it, and mostly because the governments worldwide joined forces and introduced an amount of safety regulations everywhere that sounds insane until you remember that these rules were literally written in blood. And similarly, losing your life or getting injured on a modern ship is a pretty rare thing to happen (either as employee or passenger) if you contrast it with the situation just five decades or so ago.

> We effectively have that kind of gatekeeping now with the University degree and University recruiting pipelines (all other candidates are "external" and illegally deprioritized but it's somehow allowed).

Degree mills aren't the kind of gatekeeping I'm talking about. If you screw up, you still can go to another company and continue screwing up there, which also means there is barely any incentive to hold education institutions accountable to deliver good education. In the regulated trades however? Screw up enough and you're out for good.

> Licensing just gatekeeps it more to even more dumbass people with connections getting good roles. It should be more merit based to avoid this kind of thing.

Trades licensing is merit based.