I owned an agency before and my employees under NDA wrote opensource projects for celebrity developers.
It was effectively a GhostCoders for hire service.
Out of them a few developers got very popular. It was a matter of luck more than anything. Anything can catch wind anytime, we just needed to keep up with the trend.
One way to catch this is coding style. Since, we employed GhostCoders - style varied considerably if a person looked deep - they could detect it, tho we tried to create a guidelines per celebrity programmer still picking up a particular style is quite difficult.
Hammering out dozens of project every month for a celebrity programmer needed that we hire multiple coders as no one would work all living hours.
Every project was a greenfield project, so hiring ghostcoder wasn't difficult at all.
Once you've proved your Opensource worth, companies would employee you as a celebrity coder and you just need to blog, tweet and give talks. Illusion of work is sometimes more important than the real work.
But even the ones who didn't get that popular accured a portfolio of contributions which helped them get a well paid cushy job.
Once you've breached a significant popularity threshold, you don't have to go through any interview and people assume you possess superior knowledge about everything.
This is why we still offer ghostcoding service to turn you into a popular Opensource developer, you might also recoup costs through Patereon.
So reading this i am not very surprised.