Haven't seen your post before submitting mine, but as you can see, the road is open to everyone, and people do change the ways they behave (and some even become global moderators at that)
That doesn't mean that they weren't banned at some point. As I said earlier, most bans are temp bans which serve as warnings for that user to increase their post quality or risk longer bans and eventually permanent bans.
As far as I can tell, Lauda actually received temp bans during their earlier days before being promoted to staff. So yes, the road is open to everyone, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't ban people at all.