Maybe I didn't phrase it well. Georgia Tech of course has students who perform poorly and fail so their point wasn't everyone is good enough.

Their point was after getting to the top 30% there's really no signifier of who's going to fail or how much they would succeed. After a certain level of basic qualification it's essentially random to them.

So those people of course will get through the hiring process. The issue is whether you actually have a model to filter them out at hiring. Since a workplace Utopia as you suggested doesn't exist yet, I suppose no one has that model yet. So picking the top 0.01% is essentially randomness because as far as we can tell the top 30% are all the same.

It's actually that you aren't qualified to say who's competent. The CEO can't hire a tech competent CTO and that multiplies down the line. In the absence of a tech savvy judiciousness they fall back on fluff like "devops culture fit" and "growing the team" to be like "silicon valley culture". Hundreds of recruiters will sell them that story (those recruiters are really in the PR industry) and you end up with incompetence all around except everyone has become good at selling their own incompetence as the highest form of tech savvy. Most prevalent in older enterprisey firms.