It's high time for this to end. The world doesn't need academic degrees for paper-push type jobs.

Under capitalism, it won't.

You're right, of course. The purpose of the credentialism is to sustain class barriers. Most of these jobs are brain-dead simple, and quite a large number are unnecessary (see: Graeber's Bullshit Jobs).

The reason employers hire overqualified people is actually quite complex. Classical nice-guy management theory ("Theory Y") would argue that it's bad for morale to hire smart people and put them on dumb work, but in practice it turns out that bosses can easily utilize this discomfort by selectively and politically offering more engaging assignments, so the morale hit is offset (from a careerist manager's perspective) by the enhanced power and importance accruing to managers. So, don't expect it to change. Workers will often work extra hard "to prove themselves" (i.e., for free) because they think it was benevolent bureaucratic mishap, rather than deliberate emotional manipulation, that got them placed on work several levels below their actual ability (and thus underpaid and easier to exploit).

The truth, though, is that the system only works if the people at the bottom believe meaningful promotion is a real possibility... and indeed, it sometimes (rarely) can be, but for each person who wins, tens or hundreds have to lose, especially given that the few good jobs have already been allocated to progeny of wealthy or connected families. Companies can only get diligent, conscientious work out of people (as opposed to bare-minimum work, over which the associated middle management checking/correcting costs would render them uncompetitive) if they lead people to wildly overestimate their prospects. This requires a whole mythology wherein each hire has to be, at least, a longshot call option on an executive; companies want college graduates in call centers because they want call center managers to work like people who might one day be executives (even though, let's be honest, 99 percent of them won't be) rather than like people who would be better served by leaving at 5:00 on the dot.

WFH is set to totally break this. When you WFH, you increase your per-hour productivity by about 150 percent and your total productivity by about 70 percent... but your chance of being promoted to an executive role drops to near zero. You go from spending 50 hours at the office to work a 10-hour week to working about 17 hours in 17 actual spent hours. You're now doing your job duties and probably doing them better than before, but you're snubbing the carrot of promotion into the executive clique. They can no longer entice you with your own office (as opposed to a depressing cubicle or, worse, a seat in an open-plan fartbox) if you already have a home office and a zero commute. So, once you go WFH, you're basically admitting that "work" is not some passion but the depressing trade of one's finite time for a very small amount of money, and this blunt fact about corporate work is so depressing that even executives hate to acknowledge that it is true.

So, yeah: don't expect it to change, unless capitalism is overthrown. The corporate system runs entirely on empty, unrealistic promises. The mythology in which every loser paper-pusher might one day be a CEO can only hold if employers demand that even the loser paper-pushers have CEO-able degrees. If they hired at-level for menial jobs, they'd get people who'd probably do the jobs just as well, and for a lower price, but they wouldn't get people who'll do scut work with smiles on their faces and thereby make the bosses actually feel good about themselves.