But we don't work for the system, fundamentally, we work for ourselves, and the system incentivizes us to work for it by aligning our constraints: if you work that direction, you'll get that reward.

Overconfident people ofc do not contribute positively to the system, but they skew the system reward's calculation towards them: I swear I've done that work in that direction, where's my reward ?

In a sense, they are extremely successful: they managed to do very low effort, get very high reward, help themselves like all of us but at a much better profit margin, by sacrificing a system that, let's be honest, none of us care about really.

Your problem maybe, is that you swallowed the little BS the system fed you while incentivizing you: that the system matters more than yourself, at least at a greater extent than healthy ?

And you see the same thing with AI: these things convince people so deeply of their intelligence that it blew to such proportion that NVidia is now worth trillions. I had a colleague mumbling yesterday that his wife now speaks more with ChatGPT than him. Overconfidence is a positive attribute... for oneself.