Generally, no. I agree with you.

In every case I've seen with healthy leadership, you could just ask who the top people are. Up to about 200-person size groups, you could ask any leader (even the top group leader) and they could just tell you. Because they generally know who is doing what, how difficult the various things are and who is turning in consistently outstanding work. (If the leadership can't do this, they might not be paying close enough attention.)

Performance reviews can serve many different purposes, but I don't think this is one of them.

I don’t think “performance reviews” in the traditional sense are a silver bullet for finding the sorts of employees to invite to such a retreat. They’re good for finding “top performers” (by definition - you define what performance looks like, score your employees on it, and the ones with the highest score are your “top performers”). I personally don’t think that’s particularly useful, and it’s almost completely useless from the perspective of trying to find up-and-coming employees, or insightful employees, or whoever else is most useful to the company at such a retreat.

Finding “true” top performers requires much more effort than your average mid-large company wants to spend. You need a collaborative effort between individual contributors, line managers, VPs, and the C-suite to get a good idea of who the most important people in the company are. And part of that is politics (making sure that everyone knows who you are and why you’re important) - there’s always a chance that a super critical person slips under the radar.

As an engineer I can tell you who the most important people in my section of the org chart are off-hand, in order of importance. As in, people without whom my org would fail, or at least flounder. Some of them are engineers, some of them are sales/business liaison, some of them are “management” (but frequently do a hell of a lot more than “just” manage). I don’t think a traditional performance review would identify all of them as being mission-critical, but it would probably identify them all as performing at least as expected for their roles.

I know at least one fairly critical junior engineer[0] that maybe isn’t the fastest or most efficient worker, but is learning fast and could easily be a top-tier engineer with the right support and growth opportunities. Fortunately my company did identify this and has given them a number of opportunities (including an invite to the retreat, among many others), but a standard performance review would probably score them as “adequate” or whatever other mid-tier. The way this happened for us is frequent “skip-level” meetings, 1-1 or 1-many, as well as quarterly team retreats with all members (up to the VP) present. This allows 3 levels of employees to all interact, and if you keep on top of this as a senior manager or VP (with either an engineering background or an open mind, which all people in this scenario have) it becomes fairly straightforward to find these people. It’s not a formula, or a set of rules/identifiers, or even some guidelines that are followed, which makes it tricky to make this “fair” - it relies on everyone involved having good judgement.

[0] I know “critical junior engineer” doesn’t sound great, but it’s what happens when you have a rag-tag team of engineers building a product from the ground up with minimal support from the rest of the company (and thus few resources), and then hit it big and suddenly have a largely successful product on your hands that was written by essentially 4 people. Each one of those 4 people are non-overlapping domain experts, and it just so happens that 3 of them are senior engineers and 1 is a junior. Over the last 6 months this has been improving, but a year ago, it literally was 1 critical junior engineer who was the only person who knew about 20% of the product.