My idea is to hire these devs that aren't ready to write code themselves, and have them do lots of technical QA. Pull down the code, run it on their machine, test all endpoints in Postman, write some simple scripts, etc. Then after several months doing that, give them a raise to move them closer to a dev salary and move them to active dev work.
You get to 1. Hire devs at a big discount since they won't be doing dev work quite yet. 2. Get to work with them for several months before letting them get active on code. 3. Even with the raise post QA period, they would be at a below market rate for junior devs.
Junior devs get 1. Experience in a technical position. 2. Opportunity to continue learning and see what it takes to build professional quality code. 3. On ramp to being a dev.
Maybe I got the numbers wrong on this and it isn't feasible. But it seems like a good tradeoff for agencies to bring on devs. Because devs are crazy expensive in the US and agencies have a hard time bringing them in while staying profitable.