The real thing you’re getting at is that people should only be paid and promoted for real work, and not for bullshit work, but that’s basically impossible to measure once organizations grow beyond a certain size.

Also, in orgs beyond a certain size, “holistic” peer review based evals make bullshit promo culture worse, not better. It basically ends up meaning how much people like you, and accelerates the shift toward a culture where people optimize for that instead of doing real work. And then you’re back at square one.