idk if this is steel, but I think the basic counterpoint is that humans are biased. No matter what, you are going to be compared against your co-workers sometimes (think layoffs or raises). Say your manager has 10% of budget to allocate to raises. How do they allocate? What is fair? OP seems to advocate for the manager to just know who is high impact and be fair. But even if the manager is good and their team is happy and productive, there's probably not consensus on what this should look like. So it's attractive to codify this process and try to remove human bias.