But it means you also earn the same regardless of competence, creativity, or general usefulness as an employee.
There is probably no strong correlation between creativity/competence and the skills to negotiate a salary. There is probably a strong correlation between salary and gender, extrovertness, etc. and some correlation between years of experience and competence (within a particular scale). So, yes, it is inherently (more) fair.
No its not, it punishes competent people and rewards incompetence. There is a reason no leading tech companies do this. A university can only get away with this because good professors can earn more money from grants and can get perks like tenure.
Also, if someone can't negotiate their own salary, that's their own problem. Not being able to convince a company you are worth money either means you don't understand what value you can provide or you actually aren't providing that much value. It's not up to the company to do that for you. Doing it is less fair to anyone that knows what they are doing.
Isn't this whole discussion exactly the same old one made between salaried based wages and performance based wages? One side arguing that salaried employees could just roll their thumbs and still get paid, while the other side argues that you would get fired or simply that people who do so won't get hired in the first place.
The reason no leading tech company does this is that they are all trying to pay the least amount of money. You seem to forget that just a few years ago most big tech companies were found to run a scheme to reduce salaries of people working for them.
There is probably no strong correlation between creativity/competence and the skills to negotiate a salary. There is probably a strong correlation between salary and gender, extrovertness, etc. and some correlation between years of experience and competence (within a particular scale). So, yes, it is inherently (more) fair.