As a HYP alum (don't want to be more specific than that), this jives with my own experiences, both at college and in high school (where some students kept their heads down and worked for their grades, and others worked but also had the temerity/privilege to go ahead and ask for a better grade).

In some sense, you can't really blame the students for asking. The system allows for it (may even encourage it), so from a game-theory perspective, the better strategy is to exploit all the advantages you can.

The unfairness comes from the way such things are handled unevenly. Student A who's richer/better connected/more famous/etc. will get better outcomes from asking, compared to student B who's maybe just a regular smart person who went to public school and managed to squeeze past admissions but isn't connected to anybody important. Just regular old privilege, pure and simple.

For the record, I graduated with a 3.2 GPA that probably would've been lower at somewhere that somehow magically didn't have "grade inflation" problems... and that was after my school went through implementing a controversial "grade deflation" policy. I feel like I benefitted from being part of a system that was afraid to harshly grade its students, but I also never asked any professors directly to revise my grade higher.

I did receive indirect/unsolicited help, such as a dean who showed concern after I failed some midterms the semester I broke my ankle and missed weeks of class and became depressed and unable to socialize, or a professor who graded a senior project much more generously than I felt the work deserved (a B+ for something I crammed together in the last 4 weeks, when my roommate who did something much more involved and much better researched, also got the same B+).