Why? They've already decided how badly they want to attract talent and set their salary budgets accordingly. You're asking them to pay more than is good for their businesses?

If their business can't afford market wages, then it was never a viable business in the first place.

Market wages are what they are because some other viable business can afford to pay them.

Failing businesses don't get to pay less on utilities, why should they get to pay less on wages?

If I set my phone budget at a dollar, I don't write articles in newspapers complaining that I can't buy an iPhone.

If you can justify setting your phone budget at a dollar, then your life is structured in such a way that any phone would deliver at most one dollar's worth of value to you and, in this respect, you are highly unusual.

If, on the other hand, there are 100,000 companies who all think that adding a insert-your-favorite-kind-of-specialist-here will enable their company to generate $X additional revenue per year, where X is an above-average income that many people would love to earn, but they can't find anyone to do the job for $X, it makes sense to broadcast throughout society the message that this kind of special skill may be worth obtaining.

If your specialist is generating $X additional revenue per year then the company will be paying him more like $X/3.

Many specialists will realise that working for one's self or in partnership with a small group of other specialists is far more lucrative.

So there's no contradiction here. The employers are right to say that if they could employ more specialists on the cheap then they would win more business and make more money. And the specialists are right to say that they make more money with a different working arrangement.

None of this implies that there is actually a real shortage.

Is there such a thing as a real shortage, except in the context of an objective that can't be satisfied due to that shortage?

It's usually possible to generate additional revenue if you can hire people at below market wages (and compete on cost).

That's how IT closes skills gap, and pretty efficient at that.