You can look at China's history to see this. The civil service exams weren't perfect, and a lot of their most interesting people (artists, scientists, etc.) actually failed them because they didn't have the patience for all the rote memorization and for the conformity that success in that game required. Likewise, often the people who excelled at the exams (whether because of genuine talent or mere material ambition) turned into well-paid inconsequential bureaucrats, but--and this is key--the exams' existence, by forcing society to make it an unquestionable pillar that there must always be a supported market for intellectual talent, made China flourish for centuries, even if the exams themselves were flawed.
Indeed, what today's Chinese (meaning the leadership) understand well is that we in the West and especially the Anglosphere, by handing the keys over to our short-sighted, micro-optimizing merchant classes, have all but guaranteed our own decline. China [1] has thousands of years of experience at making sure that, no matter how rich a businessman may get, he will never attain even full respectability let alone the cultural influence requisite to corrode a society from within the way ours has. The West, which may not survive the disaster that has been neoliberalism, needs to learn before it is too late that spreadsheets themselves do not generate useful arts or scientists, never have and never will.
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[1] I may sound fawning on this particular point, but I'm not pro-CCP and never have been. China's maltreatment of Tibetans and Uyghurs is especially deserving of execration. Their government has done quite a lot that is wrong. However, China's 5,000-year commitment to, while allowing the merchant class to flourish when it is useful, keeping it in its rightful place below actual intellectuals, is a case of excellence (not unbroken in time, perhaps) we should try to replicate.