There are a trillion arbitrary signals that will help or hinder your success in various ways.
Physical attractiveness, gender, race, parental background, your nationality, where you can work, your accent, language... the list is honestly almost endless.
You can wish for a world in which none of this were true, or do your best to find a place within it. Sure, don't lose sight of justice, but recognise that you can't change the world alone.
For all of the reasons I stated above?
I think you'd have to be severely mentally deficient in order to think that commercial software development operates in some sort of strict high score board fashion.
OSS development I think is significantly closer if you allow for the sampling bias that only certain groups have enough time to contribute.
Some of it is like that, but not much.
As much as I like open source, there is a lot of myth making around it too.
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Second whether obvious or not, people argued that we meritocracy on these forums here for years. And some still do. At meritocracy peek, Github had even that meritocracy carpet or whatever it was.
Anyway, FOSS makes yearly polls about these topics. It is biased toward more involved projects, but again I don't think someone's one weekend demo is what is talked about here.
As someone who has spent more time on the hiring side than the job seeker side over the last 10 years, I find these articles funny. I ask myself if each method could tell me what I need to know about a candidate. For many, the answer is no. Then I ask myself if I think the remaining method are fair and often the answer is no. Then I think about how much hassle they are for the candidate and the best methods seem really onerous for the candidate.
I always come back to the way I handle it. And now that I'm looking for a job again I had one interview where the technique impressed me enough to change my style a bit in the future, or at least add some options to what is a dynamic process.
Perhaps you're speaking from the perspective of dev jobs in Europe, or just outside the US, but even in the midwest where the only "tech" companies are really just the largest commerce/healthcare/financial institutions, dev jobs still pay $75,000+ for entry-level positions. Ignoring the fact that cost of living and taxes are way lower in the midwest than they are on the coasts, it's still a fact that with just a bachelors degree computer science opens up a plethora of opportunities.
If the price to pay is grinding Leetcode problems for a few weeks that's a pretty small price to pay. Honestly.
And the commerce/healthcare/financial enterprises that you mentioned are really picky and don't even care about leetcode, they filter based on resume prestige like law firms. Without connections, having attended a prestigious University or experience at other fancy companies you ain't getting your foot in the door regardless of your leetcode level.
If you've only been coding at mom & pop corner shops, you'll be doing that for a long time as most big enetrprises you mentioned won't even look at your resume.
Many of these "hiring is broken in tech" posts are like you said: moaning or a remarkable lack of self-awareness.