I found this to be true as well. If you're coming in through the resume route, yes you'll be judged on GPA. My co-op job had a particular emphasis on GPA since we were a branch of the school, hired loads of co-ops from the school (lots of datapoints), had permanent hires from the school, and had enough people familiar with the courses in each subject to tell what the course was like.

If you're not going for that sort of job, then all you need is the GPA threshold, and no one is going to care afterwards. Get out of the square root club if you're there and pull up your GPA to where your target job wants it. So if their filter cutoff is 3.5, get a 3.51 and call it a day. If your target job cuts off at 3.0 then really that's all you need to get. It could reduce your stress level (not sure how bad UW is), and let you do other things that would help your chances of getting a job more (clubs, leadership positions, volunteering, networking, etc). Some people split up their GPA between "core GPA" and "cumulative GPA", which could help if you're doing bad in your chem classes but passing all your CS classes.