Crap deal? SO salary is a dream, even if it was 30% less, it would be better than anything I could possibly imagine.
House prices in HKG? Who cares, I'm never going to own a home in Canada either, I can barely pay my rent. If I can even just save a thousand dollars a month my life would be so much better than it is now.
There it is in a nutshell, lower requirements enough and of course you will find someone hungry for the job. New joiners are no longer entering the profession hoping to make a better life for themselves than they would with a “normal” job, or even expecting to ever own a home. Once, surviving military training and deployment, or surviving GA/ flight instructing or the bush was a requirement before getting a shot at a jet job (let alone an intercontinental wide body). Your experience then commanded a commensurate salary, after a few years on the seniority list. Just ten years ago, five thousand hours of flying time would barely get you an interview with CX, these days it’s more like fifty or five hundred at best. You get what you pay for: in this case, you get inexperience.
As Bokpiel says the industry is not what it once was, and it will only get worse before we are replaced completely by automation. In the meantime accidents (due to poorly trained/inexperienced crews inadequately responding to unusual situations which require actual flying skills and hard-earned experience) will occur ever more often, driving the regulators and public to push for ever more automation...
This is why the one thing I suggest to junior crew joining nowadays is to cater for a plan B outside of flying, as I don’t think anyone under forty today will see a full career as a pilot. As for us old f@rts, we can count ourselves lucky we saw a full and half-decent career at all: I’m sure glad I’m not starting out now.