As someone wanting to get into the industry by my merits as a programmer your posts today have been disheartening

The magic factor here is that Select succeeded publicly. You can put in 100% of the effort he did, but if you don't have the recognition, it wouldn't be worth as much.

If you want a similar situation for yourself, but just for programming, get active on social media, put code up publicly on github/gitlab, participate in high-usage open source projects, start a blog, start going to public events and networking, and of course get good at programming.

Select didn't really skip much of the hiring process by virtue of his accomplishments, and he'll likely have a similar internship experience as everyone else.

You can know people and skip most of the interview process. Same for just getting good at technical interviewing.