Regarding being a Fellow: finding out that people respect senior engineers and take into consideration their past experience isn’t shocking, or an example of the rules not applying to them. Similarly, if you told me that a head chef at a restaurant has more impact on the menu than a line cook, it wouldn’t be an indication that the rules don’t apply to head chefs, or that nobody cares about their performance. And nobody would make claims that restaurant’s menu didn’t reflect their “ethos” because it was designed by an experienced head chef.
I actually do think that Go in its adoption by Google is a reflection of Google engineering values. I still don't think that someone who comes in to Google at the level that the Go creators came in would have the same experience as someone who came in entry level cut their teeth moving up through Google but that's just my perspective. A lot of people I met had only been at 1 or 2 other companies before Google (my TL had actually been at Google his whole professional life) and a lot of their opinions about engineering were shaped by how Google did things.
Do you have an actual example of ways in which their treatment by Google differs from other engineers? These seem like conjecture about what their work experience is like.