Hi thanks for the reply. The only thing he could think of was that he skipped through a couple of videos on Google's official YouTube developer channel that day. But likely coincidental. (On a sidenote, when my coworker had access, autoscaling was broken, like completely, hence in part my curiosity).
The early access was based on a user account being added to an access list. But, I'm not sure why your team member had access without explicitly asking for it.