Ugh, that's the worst feeling. @alicebarnes is right that weight can help, but a week under books might not be enough for a bad warp. You gotta get some moisture back into that paper to relax the fibers. Try putting a damp cloth, not wet, just damp, on the back of the page and then press it under something really heavy for like two weeks. It's a slow fix but it can pull a lot of that ripple out.

Honestly, that "no-code" boom made my old web dev skills feel useless overnight.

Totally this. "Too clean" means they can't see the work. Nina834 is dead on. That cake without the kitchen line from the other comment hits hard. My own portfolio used to be just finals and it felt like a museum, not a working process. Adding a couple messy slides with early sketches and even a bad client revision made a huge difference. It turns a pretty picture into a story about solving a problem, which is what they're actually hiring for.