OK, can you point us to that consensus please? Anything published?

I would have thought that if there were literature on that consensus, the author would have cited it. But they didn't. And the entire tone of their article is speculative.

Gaussians are generally considered the default assumption for a process with an error term with unrestricted movement in both directions, until shown otherwise.

> OK, can you point us to that consensus please? Anything published?

Here's just one article - it references numerous studies and meta-studies, broadly making the case that Pareto distributions tend to fit real-world data better than Gaussian (including employee performance, if you observe the section titled "Managing People"): https://hbr.org/2022/01/we-need-to-let-go-of-the-bell-curve