Yes, all of this is true today. (Most of it, anyway. I strongly doubt that "advertise your skills via open source participation and leverage that into a paying career" scales as well as you seem to suggest. And 'watwut is right about the rest. When did you last use a computer in a public library? It is rarely an environment conducive to study.) None of this was true when I started; perhaps you overlooked my mention of the model of machine on which I did that.

But that's beside my point in any case. My point is that that wasn't the only good fortune which mattered - necessary, to be sure, but not sufficient. Had I not in later life happened upon a job with someone who made it possible for me to transition from the second-shift telephone support role for which I'd been hired into what became my first real dev job, and served as an apprenticeship in business besides, I'd be driving that Uber today.

Again, my point is not that one or another specific piece of good luck made it possible for me to build the professional life I have. My point is that to do so has required so many pieces of good luck, any one of which going differently would have changed the entire course of affairs, that it is impossible to imagine this approach could scale. It's like flipping a coin ten times in a row fairly, and having it come up heads five times and land on edge the other five. Clearly that can happen, or I'd be driving that Uber right now. But you cannot reasonably expect it, or demand it, or require it, of anyone.