It's possible to read the post you're responding to a lot more charitably than that, and I think it would be more along what HN aspires to be to do so.
I understood his point to be that due to the heightened scrutiny given to all questions of discrimination nowadays, any sort of "holistic" evaluation was abandoned in favor of supposedly objective "Spreadsheet Mentality" evaluations.
This certainly has advantages, not only against conscious discrimination, but also unconscious biases (the infamous "team fit" ending up in homogeneous team composition). But it has large disadvantages as well, in that all employee contributions which do NOT easily fit into the few "objective" metrics are disregarded, which can lead to employees' value to an organization being substantially distorted. I find the rating scales I've seen a highly imperfect fit to the entire contribution an employee can bring.
And the underlying assumption that such rating scales are objective and not subject to manipulation or biases is highly questionable. Ultimately, it all comes down to a manager's judgement, and a bias does not disappear if you dress it up with a numerical weight.