People who get unblocked by Pat and as a result accomplish their work are very likely to talk about the latter and forget/not mention the former when it comes to performance review time.

This seems pretty unlikely to surface. Saying "oh you do that by doing these 3 things" in Slack, or going off and fixing a broken thing in a test environment, might save someone else hours or days, but they won't report somewhere "this person saved me hours", particularly if it happened 3-12 months ago (whatever the review cycle is). Combing through emails and commits is also just pretty unlikely to happen.

>here'll be work record somewhere, either emails, commits (if they're software engineers) or system audit trails.

Sure, it'll be somewhere. Will a manager bother looking around for that when it comes time to layoff? Do they even care about that to begin with? Are they even close enough to the product where they bother to look at something like a commit log? Half may not even look at the dang Jira points they keep forcing teams to keep up with.

It comes down to care, and to be frank (in my experiences) almost no manager cares enough to take that time. They have a lot of other stuff on their plate, after all. They aren't rewarded for retention, they don't necessarily get punished if the companies underperforms as long as they can rationalize a scapegoat. why try to retain these low key "glues"?

>if you ask those 20 people during performance review, it'll clear as day.

My performance reviews tended to be personal, in my experience. a skip manager/director may ask about my direct lead, but other than that I can't recall ever calling someone out (good or bad) during one.

It comes down to the same metric, are those managers/directors going to take the time to ask everone about who they think is an unsung hero?