I can definitely understand why a team could dissolve. But there are really only upsides for employees to understand why they're being paid X and to be able to model their behavior after the person that gets paid Y.
Was it fair? Who knows, it's not really possible to debate that because it all depends on your definition of "fair". But in my experience, it's not very realistic to assume that employee A sees what employee B makes and objectively understands how they need to improve to make what employee B makes. Especially since that's not really how pay is negotiated anyway.
Seems like a bit of an extreme statement.