Data point:
Applied for the card on the Sept 1st and received it today (Sept 8th).
I probably called Membership Rewards around 7-8 times, and was denied on all of them (i tried mentioning both 6661 and 6939.
On the last call, the lady said "i see here that you called many times today already", and we now have on this department specific instructions to only approve bonus ID's if you are targeted...