Why do so few people major in computer science?

You are assuming the companies care enough. Their current strategy is petition the government to open offshoring quotas. That's much easier and cheaper than actually figuring something out.

I'll go with a different angle on this problem. Computers have become indistinguishable from magic for most of the modern population. Even with IDEs like IntelliJ and Visual Studio, the interface of programming has not kept pace with the sexiness of GUIs. As a result, lots of young people take computers for granted and give up quickly when presented with UNIX, git, and the rest of the command line tech stack used by programmers.

I'd say that the decreasing percentage of women in computing has also hurt. When I starting working almost a couple decades ago at Cray, they had significantly more women in programming. Today, most hard sciences graduates are women, but only about 25-30% of CS graduates are women. I don't have a great answer why this fall-off is happening, but it seems to be a symptom of cultural issues. Maybe it's the influence of VCs and the bro culture bias of finance? I honestly don't know.

One of the biggest factors that made me withdraw from CS was learning programming in high school. I had a teacher who wasn't able to communicate effectively and my own ego being bruised badly when I struggled and struggled to make code work. My second act more than a decade later gave me confidence with better teachers and internships where I saw even seasoned programmers make mistakes and develop multiple iterations before being done. This was an eye opener!

When I went to senior secondary school (class 11 and 12; this is before engineering college for 4 years starts here in India) I opted for CS as my 5th subject (4 courses are compulsory and you can opt for 1, or 2 more - you'll be scored on best 5). The teacher was doing it in C++. I still remember my first program was a for loop in C++ and before that I didn't know the C of Computers. I sturggled from the day 1. I had gone there from a village and I had never used a computer before. I just was good in Maths, Physics (or so they said and so I thought) etc and people said I should go for CS and I did.

Loop, increments, semi colons, returns, recursive everything was a deterrent. But this wasn't the real problem. The real problems were the teacher and the rest of the class. Pretty much everyone else, most of them were from the that city or other cities and had been doing CS from quite early on - many of them had their own computers to my surprise (it was quite pricey back then), as they didn't face any challenges and the teacher expected me to just go at the same speed and catch up somehow. I tried to seek his attention and get some help with the challenges I faced and he would just say a thing or two and move on, or ask a student to help me who'll help with "no, you have to put a '==' there, not '='" and I would never know why. At that time of of struggles books confused me more. I was shocked to see years later that why they didn't use C&R and why Robert Lafore and some Indian authors. Why? Also, this was also the first time I was introduced to the purely commercial nature of education where the "connection" in the class was missing right from the start which I was used to having been to boarding schools and semi rural schools.

I failed. Miserably. Again and again. But I still kept the course throughout 11 and 12, though I had a strong urge to drop it in 12 (just before the board exam; the one that matters and you get a certificate for this) and opt for something familiar and straight like Economics or Sanskrit which was I really good at. I don't remember why but I guess it was the urge to prove myself or get something that will get me or job or so; as that's what I had known about CS. I can't recall.

Anyway, for some reason my seat during the board exam (during CS paper; your seats change for all the papers) was diagonally behind my best friend who knew pretty much everythiing in the paper and I ended up scoring 3 marks higher than him out of 100. He's still cross about it.

Well, I never recovered from those initial CS trauma days. I still feel daunted by anything new in CS and get stressed. First I try to avoid it and question the need of it in the first place (like I did when I was asked to move to frotend/Angular from Android) and after a few weeks or few months when I have my hands dirty with it and I find it easy like muscle memory I look back and wonder why I was worried about it and it repeats.

In practice, you don't have to know any of these things to be (or at least pass for) a programmer. Work at a large company, someone else takes care of the build. Use a git GUI app/IDE to take care of source control. Don't use anything new.

Of course, you probably won't progress very far career-wise (or maybe you'll become a manager...) if you never venture out of the little box. But the amount of effort you'll have to invest to reap a solidly upper-middle class income is pretty minimal.

If you spend 2-3 years in industry and don't get fired, you probably know how to code well enough to satisfy your employer. And at that point you're probably gonna get more (career) value working on soft skills like planning projects, managing expectations, navigating bureaucracies, etc.