Fo any other professions have thse challenges? Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job seeking process.
There are professional certifications they are just useless. The same goes for university degrees. The field moves too fast for certification to have any value. Perhaps if you do something very “enterprise” it might be useful.
The certifications are useless because they're paper mills, driven by the same incentives as grade inflation. People get upset if they pay for the certification and then fail the test -- and those are the certification mill's customers, so that can't be allowed or people would get some other certification. Or worse, some other vendor's certification. So they make something easy enough for the 10th percentile to pass, or publish a study guide that effectively gives you the answers to the test, and then it isn't serving as a useful filtering mechanism.
Meanwhile the strongest applicants rightfully see it as a waste of money because they can get in on their other qualifications or find a job through their networks, or use not having it as a reverse filter to eliminate excessively bureaucratic employers that use it as a prerequisite, causing anyone who requires it to be filtering out more of the best applicants than the worst ones.