I got an HR meeting a couple of years back where they selected me to be laid off because I wasn't closing as many tickets off as the rest of the team. Every single ticket had been through another engineer first and they had failed to resolve it.

I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.

so they kept you aroumd then, eh? sounds like someone in HR with half a brain actually looked at the cost per ticket. those type of escalation tickets are ~3x more costly to resolve than non escalations. sounds like the total $$ per day of your tickets was higher than all your teammates.