I think this is a bit too simplistic. You can perform well without having pressure on you to perform well. Self-motivated people don't need that.

In fact there are some companies out there that my friends have moved to that don't have formal performance reviews like Meta etc, but rather continuous reviews that are low-stakes. They make more than I do now.

Top of the market rate in absolute sense is maybe only for top performers; I don’t know if they are or not. But top for the region; there are bucketloads of people (and not only on tech) in Fortune 500 companies that make a lot of money doing almost nothing and not actually contributing anything or very marginally. Deep management layers who get compensated based on weird metrics like number of people and layers ‘under them’ keep this alive and well.