My takeaway ( and an indication of who actually needs a performance review [ e.g. the manager ])

“ It’s my opinion that the biggest factor in an employee's performance – perhaps bigger than the employee’s abilities and level of effort – is whether their manager set them up for success “

Or other way around - in bigcorp (or in startup) choosing what to work on have much bigger impact than the work you do.

On very low level it's up to your manager. As time goes, even as IC you have a lot of agency. It's not just company selection, team selection, but also which part of the project you are working on and how you are approaching solving it.

Of course "if everyone does this, who will fix the bugs". However, the quickest promoted people I've seen are the people who were excellent at politics-izing (and sometimes foresight) the best work assigned to them.

I disagree. The best employees are the employees who don't need to be managed. They figure what out what needs to be done and walk into the business (from day one to the last day they are there) thinking like owners. Google in its very early days operated without managers. Some of the most successful companies / start-ups delivered what they delivered not due to management, but due to having a few highly-motivated individuals who were dead set in delivering something outstanding to the world. They didn't need to be micro-managed into doing what they did - they figured out what needed to be done and figured out how to get there.

It's not so much that managers need a performance review per se, but they need training and useful feedback.

If you've ever worked in tech management, your experience likely was "IDK, you're senior, you vaguely have an idea what we should do, here, go manage a few folks".

No training, or minimal training. Often with an expectation that of course you can still be a strong technical contributor, because how much time could managing folks possibly take. And then mostly being evaluated based on how your reports delivered.

As long as we follow that approach, we'll struggle with managers doing the right thing, because they neither have learned it, nor have they seen it modelled.

Sure, that expresses in bad manager performance, but often nobody can really see it or tell people what they should do better. Performance review is too late to fix that. (This is, btw, mostly true for employees as well - if you only talk about performance 1-4 times a year, people are being set up to fail)