Promo-culture cannot be ignored because with each level, your total compensation often increases by 50-100% at many big tech. You can absolutely expect people to alter their actions to whatever promo-culture demands. As the article says, one answer is to simply align the incentives which is to make promos based on customer satiesfaction and adoption. The issue is this: when you release new product, your adoption/satiesfaction/revenue increases infinitely because denominator is zero. Often media blitz follows which raises the profiles of small team and increasing their market value than usual bug fixer. The new learning experiences of new-product teams and ability to do aggresive hustle on impossible schedules also adds into their market value relative to Joe, the minor feature developer. These people become important because one of the growth criteria for big tech is ability to diversity, aka, release new products and excite the hopeful investors. So companies are forced to associate product releases with promos. Current promo-culture at big tech is not a bug but a feature. I think very few understand this dynamics.

There is one extremely bad aspect of promo-culture not discussed in the article: Many promos in higher level have requirement that the person must become the people manager. The idea is that at certain pay level you must be able to "scale" you impact by directing others as opposed to doing things by yourself. In tech, this is extraordinarily flawed idea. Scale can be achieved by being manager but also by being individual contributor. People like Jeff Dean has contributed far more as IC than probably most VPs at Google. I don't know how many brilliant technical ICs have killed themselves by trying to be people manager to get that alluring promo.