Most school Internet domain-blocks Wikipedia, libraries are not in walking distance for substantial amounts of people (and that's leaving out how library fees are prohibitive for low-income families), and entry-level smartphones are locked down to the point of making curiosity irrelevant.

When you look at who in this industry succeeds, you very rarely see people from low-income populations. There isn't substantial reason to believe that distribution of opportunity isn't the handicap for a significant amount of people.

YC: founded by the son of a nuclear physicist, and the son of one of the UNIX authors.

Microsoft: founded by the son of a lawyer whose firm is currently making a billion a year in revenue and was similarly doing great at the time.

Facebook: founded by the son of a shrink and a dentist operating in one of the richest areas of New York, rich enough to be sent to private school.

Apple: founded by the son of an engineer at Lockheed.

Amazon: founded by the son of an engineer at Exxon.

Netflix: founded by someone whose family was rich enough to extravagantly donate during the Great Depression.

Google: founded by son of someone with a PhD in Computer Science (one who had multiple thousand-dollar personal computers filling their house since said son was born at that), and the son of someone with a PhD in Computer Science and a researcher at NASA.

C: written by the son of someone...who worked at Bell Labs.

Rob Pike gave a great example once of how Computer Science is nothing if not under a caste system, although by accident (explaining why one of the early UNIX usernames was 'sjb'):

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/unix-quiz-answers...

8. Q: Adam Buchsbaum's original login was sjb. Who is sjb?
A: sol & buchsbaum
Adam was one of many Unix room kids with parents who worked at the Bell Labs. Adam was unusual because his father was executive vice president but apparently didn't have enough clout to get his kid his own login.

Women used to be the majority of computer programmers. Where are they now? The strongest counterexamples to the general rule of "People with rich parents that had connections" were all significantly before computing became a prestigious field, and even they didn't get all that far (I don't see McCarthy's contributions all around the field despite largely being significantly better than alternatives offered by people like Backus and Ritchie; what's the difference between the one and the other two? McCarthy was the son of communist immigrants, Backus was the son of a stockbroker, and Ritchie was the son of a Bell Labs employee).

If you look at the history of this field, you see nothing but people with all of the opportunities in the world getting all of the success from it. People from affluent families becoming more affluent through upbringings that involved science heavily. "Meritocracy" isn't "The best of the affluent children win," it's "The best win." Computer Science does not resemble meritocracy in any fashion, and largely never has.

The only general counterexample out of all of the FAANG founders, Jobs (the son of lower-middle class parents with no education to speak of), has been mocked for years for being comparatively non-technical. Notably, he strongly believed that the problem was an access problem, not some magic hand-waving "Some people are better than others!" nonsense. His vision of what libraries should be like today was far different than yours[1], but because your mindset permeates among the people who make these decisions, more or less wasted.

[1] See interview starting at 0:34 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA1nQQGw2O4