I'd ask, is everyone else really performing well? What if everyone's focusing on short term self-promotion while incurring far too much technical debt? The one person focusing on rigor then gets PIPed, even though losing them would make the team far worse. (Actual case I've seen.)

edit: while I was not put on a PIP, at FB I got a "meets most" rating in the cycle where I first built cargo-nextest. In the end nextest had a far greater impact on the world than anything else management was doing, and the same people who gave me that rating now have it as a critical dependency. It's still wild to me how little focus there was on seriously thinking about long-term project health.