I think a way to sum this up is simply metric optimizing. As organizations and companies grow larger the need to evaluate people at scale becomes necessary. And so metrics are used, and people then naturally start to optimize around those metrics. But it seems to invariably turns out that any sort of metric you create will not effectively measure progress towards a goal you want to achieve, when that metric ends up being optimized for.

The traditional term for this is cobra effect. [1] When the Brits were occupying India they wanted to reduce the cobra population, so they simply created a bounty on cobra heads. Sounds reasonable, but you need to have foresight to think about what comes next. This now created a major incentive for entrepreneurial Indians to start mass breeding cobras to then turn in their heads. After this was discovered, the bounty program was canceled, and the now surging cobra farm industry mostly just let their cobras go wild.

I think the fundamental problem is that things just don't work so well at scale, after a point. This is made even worse by the fact that things work really well at scale before they start to break down. So we need a large economy that remains relatively decentralized. But that's not so easy, because the easiest way to make more money is to just start assimilating other companies/competitors with your excess revenue. Anti-trust is the knee jerk answer but even there, are we even going to pretend there's a single person alive who e.g. Google (or any other mega corp) doesn't have the resources to 'sway'?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive