Except it doesn't work in academia, because it's the same system that's commonly present in corporate-land, and in practice it's horrible and has multiple flaws.
GPA in practice has numerous problems on which I could write a whole other book, but where it fails it is often for social reasons which would equally apply to and be gamed by people under the "limited resource/grade to the curve" model.
You will see people start to game away and politicise how the "stars" are awarded and distributed in both. In the later specifically, you run the real risk of having to start to fail genuinely good people and pass genuinely bad people. And there is no universal algorithm used by people in their subjective distribution of stars that allows one to compare or interpret the distribution of stars after the fact or between different "ecosystems".