What's with tech guys being aggressive gatekeepers during performance reviews and hiring?

Just curious. Every review cycle is constantly spammed by the management folks with their gyaans on visibility and impact. Some are genuine to encourage/motivate others, that's great. But I also feel some does it to flex their 'leadership' metrics (with their complicated calibration spreadsheets) and to make people feel like getting an exceeds expectations rating is the ultimate thing that can happen to a software engineer. What's with too much romanticising the bell curve? Do organizations use the HR policies to directly or indirectly create a premiumness? Or do the interviewers get the sense of superiority and the euphoria kicked in after rejecting a candidate in the system design round. Moreover, I don't understand how people with less than 5 years experience immediately consider themselves as hiring bar raisers just because they could ask an obscure algorithm question. I still think the real senior folks are busy enough in solving actual problems and inventing stuffs. The other set of people are just trying to act like ultimate gatekeepers during calibration meetings by riding this corporate ladder crazy wave. I'm curious to see what would happen if these big techs stop being obsessed with forced rankings. All these aggressive interviewers would vanish the next day like Thanos' snap.