If someone is roadblocked and cannot work (login issues, etc) their problem needs to be solved immediately.
If resolving that issue is causing the programmer or DBA themselves to become roadblocked and slip behind on work, they themselves can communicate that too many people are falling through the cracks to HR or whomever else is involved and get the gears moving on a fix.
If someone is roadblocked on all their work, yeah, that should be solved immediately. Even if it's less theoretically efficient than some customer service system, it's necessary in terms of treating people with respect.
But if someone has a specific task blocked? I'm not at all convinced escalating that to a programmer or DBA is a reasonable step one. Partly because the problem might be simple, mostly because switching time causes real inefficiencies.
Of course, I'm assuming competent systems here. If "IT" is an outsourced department that just tells you how to plug things in, then yeah, everyone should escalate past them quickly. But if IT is actually knowledgeable, devops has sensible workflows, and so on, then I worry that out-of-band solutions are faster on each individual issue, but end up net-negative on overall company efficiency.
The fastest way to solve a problem like "I need a report with all of this data" or "I can't login to the system" is to ask a programmer or DBA personally. But the best way is to go through some kind of channel that blocks simple requests at a managerial or IT level, so larger projects don't slip under the weight of random requests.
The customer service model here is actually quite instructive. For someone with a 'real' problem, talking to a T1 rep is a useless waste of time. But customers still get routed through T1 because the alternative is eating up scarce time with simple issues.
If I had to guess, a strategy like this works for Tesla because they've got a culture that supports it (i.e. "find the simplest solution") and a highly technical workforce. This looks like a serious case of a context-specific solution.