Not true in any field I have been associated with. Many, if not most conference review processes use blind reviews. Conferences are not full of "invited" speakers. Maybe one or two plenary sessions at the beginning, but the rest submitted their own papers and went through the blind review process. Certainly true in the best EE, CS, and ML conferences. I've served on program committees for international conferences. Around 100 papers selected typically, only two invited papers.
Most of the physical sciences have open conferences so anyone can submit without peer review. If a session has an invited speaker they are invited because the organizer knows their work.
This is such a weird denialism. Let me ask you something: if you go look at the top 100 cited researchers do you really think their enormous citation counts come from the brilliance of their work? Or is it just possible it's something else?
I'll tell you first hand, my advisor who is among those top 100, accretes citations like a black hole because he/she is famous, sits on committees (at uni and a national lab), speaks in front of Congress etc etc etc. and thus gets invited to be a coauthor on a billion papers a year (and not because of his/her brilliance).
Also if you think program committees and reviewers don't know who wrote a paper when the same group has been submitting to the same top conference every year for over a decade then I have a bridge to sell you.
Speaking as a failed scientist (I was “dishonorably discharged” with an MS from a top US institution) I will tell you that the brilliant people around me knew that paper citations don’t correlate exactly with the impact of work within. Certainly didn’t feel fair. But I can also say the system is way more meritocratic than medicine or finance
