I think it also downplays the importance of privilege in the ability to go around the corner. I think my meaning is best illustrated with a concrete example from my own life: 90% of graduates from my university get jobs through networking, outside of the normal application process. The reason this is possible is because we have one of the strongest alumni networks in the nation, allowing me and my peers to "go around the corner." But our very presence in this network is a function of our privilege: the educational and extracurricular opportunities that we were afforded as a result of whom we were born to and who we were born as, all of which led us to getting admitted and being able to afford tuition.I think it downplays the difficulty of finding the vast gate by "going around the corner," and I think that it does so at the expense of the point that the essay is trying to make. It's a rare and difficult skill to have, to be able to identify how to get around the "little door", and I think that that's a skill that most companies want to have in their employees.
It's not the same job. I've worked at companies where employees are paid bounties for finding good candidates for future employment, regardless of whether there's an open position. Every company I've worked at, we've hired people with no positions advertised anywhere. Of the four "real" post-college jobs I held, only one of them existed before I popped up as a candidate. I know two people who work at SpaceX and one person who works for SpaceX. The two who work at were at Blue Origin and decided they wanted to head south; the one who works for was a recommendation from a friend who was too busy for the gig. None of them interviewed.If you are using your connections to get the same job you might have gotten by padding your resume or memorizing the tech interview quiz, that's not going around the corner, that's more like getting pulled through the little door.