It reminds me of the (very fun) book Bullshit Jobs by the late David Graeber. He categorized one of the types of jobs as „flunkies“. Their purpose is to make upper management appear more powerful and professional.
Hierarchical power structures often have a political minigame that can easily overshadow their organizational and meritocratic purpose.
-- Watching movies? Waste of time
-- Playing Video Games - Rotting your brain
-- Watching sports for fun - wasting your money / promoting violence
-- Traveling for fun - you are destroying the environment
-- Any entertainment shows - promoting bad habits
etc.. etc..
You can extrapolate 'what I don't like, must be bad for humanity' to almost every product of leisure activity out there.
At some point, for some, unless you are living like an Amish or in some kind of 'Puritan' way, everything else you are doing is bad and you are a bad person, and that platform that enables it (Radio, TV, Online Apps, Arbnb, Uber) must be bad and needs to be abolished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
In any case, a lot of those can indeed be considered bad. Like professional sports. Participatory sports on the other hand, foster community, improve health, and entertain, all in one.
Watching movies, or the general category, art, nourishes the soul, allows us to live vicariously other people's perspectives, and builds culture. Watching crap movies, made for profit, who turn their audience stupid (or pressupose their stupidity), on the other hand, can be considered bad. The same can be said of spending hours every day watching TV.
Meth also makes for great profits.
What I wanted so say is that, these structures want to promote people upwards based on expertise, effort, popularity etc. So the structure is in part based on meritocracy - in theory.
My personal belief is that any hierarchical social structure is arbitrary and exploitable to a degree. We seem to be very good at creating personal and financial incentives without coupling them with the appropriate level of accountability.
Was meant to be a cynical comment on the number people one sees simply failing upwards. Success has many parents, failure is an orphan.
Merit at playing political games, backstabbing, lying, appearing plausible and convincing, looking like the kind of person expected at that time.
Talent, ability, hard work, placing the common goal first? Vastly less important.
Aligning self-interest with a common goal is very much an unsolved problem. Being slightly less bad is amazing. One of the most powerful facets of the visionary founder ceo owner despite most being such epic idiots is they aren't professional managers looking to cut themselves into inter-generational levels of wealth from their employer, whether they have MBAs from Harvard like G.W.Bush or not.
Structure based on on meritocracy is indeed, as you say, theory. Or justification. Or rationalisation.