But in some ways, it's worse than that, because these evaluations aren't based on the top 1%, they're based on some proxy, and that proxy is assumed to be static.
So, to simplify things, you have some placement exam. You're only allowed to take it once, twice, or a few times at a critical point in your life. We know that exam is only correlated like 0.30 at best with actual aptitude, which fluctuates over time. And yet that exam is treated as if it is correlated 0.90 or greater with aptitude, and that aptitude cannot change.
This is part of the problem too.
Some (much?) of this winner-takes-all phenomenon is due to societal structures around these occupations, nothing inherent to the occupations or activities themselves. It's rent-seeking and protectionism. My guess is at some level it's not a whole lot different from economic dynamics pre-world-wars era, but justified through different means, where society is blind for whatever reason to the errors in economic assumptions that the world works around, and the serious consequences those errors bring.
Increases in scale from technology undoubtedly play a role, but I doubt that's all of it. The NY Times once published an article about income distributions across fields, and you could see this winner-takes all phenomenon in all sorts of places. To me, it seems to have something to do with salary and benefits distributions more than anything else.
If you take medicine just as one example (which could be an entire book into itself), it's true that there have been technological advances that scale all sorts of things. But there's also little natural competition, due to overregulation. So you have a hierarchy, with medical administrators on top, physicians below, nurses below that, and then everyone else at increasing degrees of separation. This occurs in part because of the tendency for the administrators to control cash flows toward themselves, but also because the regulations make it impossible for cost structures to exist in any way but one where physicians get paid the most.
There's lots of examples of this. In my mind, the problem really is income distribution. It's not a matter of equality in the stereotypical communist sense, but more about fair or rational evaluation in an economic sense.
Everyone can point to bubbles in markets and say "this is way too overvaluated." That's something that has a clear meaning, even if it's hard to define at times. To me this overvaluation is everywhere. We live in an era of monopolies, and we rationalize it everywhere.