As long as people work to live, there will be a pressing demand for such labels, flawed though they may be. Top organizations will always want to hire the smartest/most brilliant/non-idiotic people they can afford, for various practical definitions of these terms.
If two people seem similar in every way, but Person 1 has demonstrated that they achieve greater probability of success compared to Person 2 given comparable time investments, then you'd probably want to hire Person 1. Real life is never this cut and dried, but the principle holds.
I largely agree and work is a test environment, like any other test e.g. SAT; one who performs better is rewarded.
But there's plenty of occasions where judgements is a waste of time, like at the personal level expressed in the OP article. OP does agree that the activity is result from the ego, I don't think he/she did enough to explore the ego resulting in injustice to the colleague as whole in the article.
If two people seem similar in every way, but Person 1 has demonstrated that they achieve greater probability of success compared to Person 2 given comparable time investments, then you'd probably want to hire Person 1. Real life is never this cut and dried, but the principle holds.