Uh, I can guarantee you that if a Wayne State grad student published a quantitative, methodologically rigorous APSR solo-authored article, that person would get multiple R1 TT offers.
Of course, this scenario wouldn't happen because a student who's good enough to do that would never enroll at Wayne State, or would transfer to a better department.
Bro, there's a ND grad student who didn't get any TT offers despite having multiple solo hits and a solo APSR R&R last year.
The game has changed.
Sure, but it's not about pedigree. It's about powerful people supporting you, and this happens to be correlated with pedigree. There are people from top program with good publications who can't find jobs. They usually have has-beens as advisers or pissed off the wrong people. These people would have been underplaced and worked their way up years ago. Now they don't place at all.
As for journals like PRQ, if a connected professor's student publishes in PRQ, it's a great publication. If an average professor's student publishes in PRQ, it's middling. The same discounting happens with top journals. This has always been the case. All that has changed is the supply and demand for jobs.