Slack is important. Slack is necessary for things to move at all.
(Which is not to say that the systems I'm looking at today have anywhere near the right amount of slack. Almost all lobbying should be explicitly illegal IMO. Campaign funding should be heavily regulated and enforced. Universities should be regulated so as to prevent the profit-driven hellscape they have become, at least as long as they're going to be directly or indirectly receiving tax money. Pharmaceutical companies, congresscritters, law enforcement, the prison industrial complex, ... it's a total mess. And it's not just about using the regulatory hammer, it's about underlying incentives. Everything has been captured and monetized. It's gotten so bad that I feel like it would be only fair if I were to be paid for my vote, since it feels like it's going to be converted vote -> influence -> money ever more efficiently anyway. That's not the system I want.)
But in case it needs to be said, yeah, we should probably maintain some reasonably-effective process for weeding out unproductive researchers. Again, we had one that wasn't too bad long before the bean-counters ruined research.
Unfortunately they've hyper-formalized in an utterly homogenous way. It's such a disaster that perhaps a nepotism free for all wouldn't be quite so bad. But I do think there's a deeper discussion here about how academic research can scale in a better way, both to accomplish larger/more expensive projects and to handle increased application pool sizes.