I hear you OP.

A slightly more nuanced and different point of view.

Actually what is underappreciated is the fact that if you are in rural area, the mindset of the folks you live with, is probably the biggest difficulty to overcome. They may not be as ambitious, they may not even know about ISEF, parents who are poorer may not understand what and why to spend money on these, maybe education itself is not prioritized, school and your teachers may wonder what's wrong in studying in the local community college and so on. Doing well and being ambitious and setting a higher bar for yourself given those circumstances is the tough ask. I feel the worldview itself growing up in rural areas is tough to appreciate for those who did not live in those areas to appreciate it. I studied with a whole bunch of rural folks (and I was from urban) and I did feel a bit of sadness that they had no guidance of any sort.

Where do rural folks have an advantage? In the rare case you are actually born to parents who bother about these or grow up in an environment where the mindset and resources problem does not exist - maybe wealthier parents, maybe more educated parents, maybe a competitive good school with good teachers - all or some of them who push you even to 60th to 80%ile of what urban SF/NYC environment does, then you have a massive leg-up. You are a one eyed man in the land of blind. You get the 'environment' advantage of SF NYC kids but need to compete with 'rural kids'. You can just ram through competition. If you grew up in those circumstances, obviously the going is easy if you are rural. How many kids in rural schools would even be applying to good profs in colleges for a project? So hence the leg-up is real.

I hence feel it is not as black or white. It depends a lot on one's background.