The commit queue can only be bypassed by people who are 'committers' and therefore have direct push access to the repo. Becoming a committer requires landing multiple changes, demonstrating competence and desire to continue to contribute, and being nominated and seconded by your peers. This is true for all contributors, even Google employees.

Even committers are heavily encouraged to use the commit queue, and everyone does. Something like 96% of commits land via the CQ. It's simply a bad idea not to. The main use-case for bypassing the queue is quickly reverting a change which somehow slipped through, and even those usually go through the queue anyway with a special flag that bypasses all of the tests.