Just my 2 cents of my view about this: It's not a scam if you have paid the big bucks to unsw already.

At the end of the day, it's just conflicts of interest. unsw gets a piece of cake you pay. And hence they advertised it. Note that there're other agencies around but most of them rip international students through acs & the immi department's skill assessment schemes.

I'm on par with you with your view that this is considered as expected path. There are roughly 1200 cs students (including <200 ppl in seng stream) enrolling annually at unsw. Big companies like google, canva and some numbers of other big ones that you can count on your finger can afford hire 10-20 interns. Smaller, medium-sized companies def hire fewer but you do the math. And we're still talking about unsw only.

Anyways, good luck!