In a technical or managerial role your core skills are most important. An online game has "boring" login/account services and web pages, customer service portals, internal tools etc etc, that are very similar to any other web company.

A person with no game experience might be able to break in by simply taking a title demotion for a bit and be competitive.

this is surprisingly not that uncommon

Can you elaborate? Depends on the country I guess, but generally any game dev job posting has hundreds of applicants.

I have seen it for entry level game design position for example.

but more generally, people that want to try the game making adventure one way or another is kind of a recurrent theme in the industry.