This posts sums up everything that's wrong with grading and modern colleges.
The problem is that higher education became something marketable and universities decided to sell diplomas instead of giving people a chance to learn skills they think might help them reach their goals.
Grading curves aim to mitigate punishment for the latter. It's part of why I could get a 2.5 GPA but still overall succeed in my career.
The ultimate goal is knowledge cultivation.
You're more adapt to intellectual work only if you actually cultivate knowledge.
If all this college circus is, farming grades, then universities are ultimately failing at their job.
Also note that GPA isn't just for jobs. Applying for school post bachelor's cares the most about a GPA. So a bad grade but learning a lot on a rigorous course can still male it hard to progress as a researcher or any other kind of specialized knowledge seeker.
If job prospects are the focus then we should invest in proper trade schools detached from universities that focus on teaching marketable skills.
This is a thing in countries like Germany. My uncle works in maintenance of nuclear reactors there and he went through a trade school that focused on learning the relevant parts of the job.
That is generally hard to measure and frankly there is little accountability for bad courses. At the worst end you have bad profs who are proud of high failure rates because they don't understand it as a failure to teach but as a seal of quality how rigorous their standards are complex the subject matter is that they are teaching.
Not that grading on a curve solves any of that, but it eases the burden on students.