Looking from the perspective of Poland and IT, I see the same thing Dave described.
A well done, active project on GitHub is usually worth more than a degree and two years in a company nobody heard about. This isn’t universally true for all companies, because many have nobody to evaluate you properly. But the proportion of those, who can, is large enough. And they are not stupid. Their choice is simple. A newbie with half-outdated, half-forgotten theoretical knowledge and a nice paper, whom they will have to pamper for the next 5 years, or somebody who has solid hands-on experience and has shown they can tend for themselves, including acquiring new knowledge as needed.
However, there is an important, yet easy to miss conditional. Whether the job requires skill and experience. If not, if you are applying to be an unskilled drone, then you do need all the documents. That’s not because your education or previous experience matters. Because it does not. You’ll be a gear on the production line just like hundreds thousands others, replaceable with any indistinguishable copy. But the market floods the HR with thousands and thousands of almost identical “gears” and somehow they must filter the dozen they currently need. The simplest way, which gives some semblance of rationality, is ranking them by features like earlier employment, education, languages they know, having a driving license, traits beneficial to the employer etc.