Why does it matter if you don't get promoted? What if you like doing good work, making all that impact by osmosis anyway, but do it for the sake of just liking your damn job?
I think the point of the blog-post is that in the long-term it makes it harder to be employed at all.
Kind of like the quip that you can ignore politics, but it won't ignore you.
All this job-title/promotion/levels stuff is another kind of mismatch. So a future company you would enjoy working for could still have a hiring process which looks for the stuff you dislike.
Design review? "Let's get some Staff engineers in the room". Promotions? "Senior Staff decide". At some moment there was almost a totally silly situation when a redesign for a widely-used internal system was going to happen without engineers who wrote and maintained it - just because those engineers never bothered to chase the titles.
At my company, Staffs were making promo feedback on people they've never interacted with. When asked about Jeff, they just reported, "I haven't seen Jeff's work".
The reason why the staff never interacted with Jeff was because they were both working on different things for many months. For their paths to cross, the staff would have had to be on-call for services Jeff was neck deep in.
But the director took the staff's feedback to Intuit that Jeff is not building relationships at his level. Stack ranked, pipped and fired Jeff who single handedly kept a service alive.
When one sees organizational dysfunction such as this, you start losing faith in corporate structures and management. The work environment just becomes a shithole of confusion. Dysfunctional structures and poor management practices are so pervasive in American tech industry it's a case study of it's own.
The irony is the director was the one completely failing to develop a working relationships with his subordinates and what they are doing. He's the one that should have be kicked out the door.
But they won't. Welcome to organizational dysfunction.