I predicted (correctly, it seems) that many people would downvote rather than answer the questions constructively.

I see, thanks for the info!

There's nothing like a "Freshers programming contest" in US universities so I found that very interesting...seems a lot more cutthroat than the typical US college experience! I'd also say underclassmen often look up to people who have gotten internships at Google/Facebook/etc. but many of those who got internships never did competitive programming. Perhaps this will happen in the future though, because leetcode is pretty common for interview prep in the US and Codeforces is basically just a step up from that.

Edit: with regards to "Oh no, not again" can you link me to places where this was discussed previously, I've read CF blogs for a while and haven't seen much discussion like this before lol

The world is so vast and varied, I'm simply trying to understand it better...no offense intended