So, I'd like to think this article is more about hiring practices than it is about Google, but I'll bite.
>> 1) Most likely result: I never hear back at all, because I didn't attend Stanford/MIT. (Never mind that I got accepted but didn't attend due to better financial aid elsewhere.)
I didn't go to college at all, and I've been invited to interview there by engineering managers. If I didn't have absolute golden handcuffs at my current job, I might have considered it.
Furthermore, I know plenty of people who haven't gone to any college and work at Google. If you don't hear back, it has nothing to do with the college you went to. Even if a single interviewer had this bias against you, the larger hiring committee would review each of the interviews you had with different people.
To name a couple of examples - David Byttow, founder of Secret, was hired as a Software Engineer at Google without any degree. Michal Zalewski is in an engineering director role without a degree. Once you reach the interview, the sole reason for a hire/no-hire decision is how you did in the interview process. Literally nothing on your résumé will disbar you at that point.
>> 2) If they do decide to interview me, I won't hear about it for months.
You won't hear about the interview date for months? I admit this can be frustrating for large companies, but no one I've spoken to told me it literally lasted months. The longest I've heard of was a month and a half, from first interview to hearing news.
How are you submitting your résumé? Are you just applying to the job and hoping for a recruiter to pick it up, or actually emailing a hiring manager at Google? If you apply without trying to get the attention of a decision maker it always takes longer because that's how the process works at large companies.
>> 3) I'll have to drill on data structures and efficiency of sorting algorithms I've literally never implemented outside of an interview or academic setting.
While algorithmic questions are asked, they do not make up the entirety of the technical interviews at Google. Generally speaking from what I have seen, questions are not "implement a linked list", questions are "implement this program" and you are free to choose which algorithm is best. However, I acknowledge that interviewers might not always follow this.
>> 4) Even having drilled on those arbitrary questions, I'll likely fail the interview because after a multi-day gauntlet of questions a random engineer didn't like the particular assumptions I put into my Fermi model of golf balls.
Fermi questions are actively discouraged by the Hiring Committee, and questions involving these will be thrown out when evaluating an interviewer's analysis of an employee. As someone elsewhere in the thread mentioned, this would involve a strongly worded email from the Hiring Committee afterwards.
The first thing to understand about Google's hiring process is that you are interviewed onsite using five or so 1:1 sessions. The interviewer has to perfectly transcribe everything that happens and needs to be able to explain their decision to the Hiring Committee. The Hiring Committee will not consider answers from an interviewer like, "He couldn't tell me how many stoplights are in Los Angeles" or answers like "He didn't give a good enough answer about why he wants to work here."
I realize this seems like "my anecdata is better than your anecdata", but what are you saying is actively negative and contrary to a lot of the literature about what Google's hiring practices. I'm not saying their hiring practices are perfect - far from it. But you seem to be ascribing malice to their methodology when it's really not the case.