I agree with you, and wish this perspective had informed many of the comments nearby.

I'm commenting because my own kid went through the LAUSD highly gifted (HG) magnet program -- which is a subset of the "gifted" program -- his high school was: https://www.highlygiftedmagnet.org.

(Without belaboring the point, it's a very high-achieving bunch. Multiple Harvard, MIT, and Stanford admissions in his rather small graduating class of ~70.)

There are good things and bad things about the LAUSD HG program. One good thing is that most admissions are done just by testing. There are 2 layers of tests, one for gifted and one (later) for highly gifted. If you test 99.5%+, you can be admitted to the HG program. The tests are done relatively early (4th grade for my kid) so they aren't as easy to game, although I'm sure it is done.

Every LAUSD student gets the first test, so that's pretty egalitarian. You have to ask for the second test. That's the good part.

One thing the article discusses is the other paths to admission at some schools -- paths that are much more subject to gaming, esp. by parents. Things like outside evaluations and private testing to substitute for the LAUSD-administered test. That has been a source of controversy, rightfully IMHO, because these parents can be bulldogs. The possibility of gaming the system is the bad part.

One other thing to re-inforce in the above comment. The HG program did tend to favor "high-achieving" rather than "gifted" students. So there was a high proportion of boring grindset students, weighted towards STEM, and the result was that the actually creative types were in a minority.

My conclusion is that these programs can benefit the special needs of HG kids, but the devil is in the implementation details and the parents and status game will tend to mess it up. Also, we should have no illusions that their existence is in part a reaction to racial/social inequities, and that they tend to reproduce the problems of the outside society.