My problem with your example is that the loner didn't have comparable value. If it was supporting other things, then it failed. If it was doing something non obvious, it shouldn't be compared to the support. It feels fallacious, though I can't name one specifically.

System sight is itself an issue. Many companies evaluate an employee solely on some performance metric, typically tied to money. Because it's easy (and lazy).

I've had several positions where my task was to keep things running. I added no value, I prevented loss. And those positions get screwed because they're very difficult to quantify worth and very hard to see (and if it doesn't create money, they don't care). You only notice them when something goes wrong. Such an employee may keep everything running all year and get a "meets expectations" because there's an upper limit on how much contribution the system sees, and the system doesn't want to put in the effort to see better. I may have had to climb over an air handler to get to a transducer to calibrate, but that's not sexy and even if I report such effort, it's what I'm supposed to do (even if I wasn't, weekend nights are weird).

No one is going to write down "keep machine running 80% of the time" because people unassociated with the task will insist that 100% is the expectation, despite that being unreasonable.

A system built of people is not a black box. We can see them and evaluate them based on the task they're supposed to do, but the evaluators don't want to put in the effort to do their tasks in a way that means more work for them.

There's a comment to be made also about scope creep for a position so that a company doesn't have to hire marketing and engineering if they can get the engineers to do it. Despite them being suboptimal for the task. Something something down with unrestrained capitalism.

Ok. I've lost the plot at this point and made my point. Have a good one.