There was no stack ranking or any other political BS. Here's your pool, do with it as you wish. So, if you ask me, zero sum sucks, but it at very least lets the person closest to the action get a chance to make a call.
It also prevented the managers from just handing out raises for no real reason. For example, you've got two people that have had great years and another that's just been treading water. If you give them the raise you want to, you're going to wind up with nothing left for the third. With an unlimited sum of money at your disposal you may kick that person a percent or two to prevent hurt feelings, now you've got to make the hard call.
Or, if that third person also had a good year and you want to fight for them, you can run it up the chain and shake out a few percent for them. It was always there for the asking if you felt like going through some effort to get it.
So yeah, there's better ways to do it, but it's also not completely awful either.
We can debate how that $X should be divided between workers, executives, creditors, shareholders and reinvestment. But there's no "financial reality" that means workers' share has to be zero.
Every organisation has rules and budgets and procedures, but they're made by people and if they don't work right they can be fixed by people. It's not like the CEO received the budget from God on stone tablets on a mountain 2000 years ago.
If I wanted to work in some calcified bureaucracy where rules were more important than outcomes and worker performance was irrelevant, I wouldn't be working in the private sector!
It's also highly unlikely that your singular effort created 10K more profit. That 10K was likely the culmination of a number of people who had varying levels of participation in the effort.
Unless you're working at a company that tracks your hours to every single possible project you're working on, there's often a huge blind spot as to where exactly your effort is going as it pertains to revenue. Unless your in professional services or some other type of billable position, then I actually agree with your notion to a degree...
With regards to people in billable positions, I once workthink d for a company that did something I really thought was neat. At the end of every quarter they'd announce a profit sharing rate based off of whatever it was that defined the rate. Since we were all billable this rate was at $X per billable hour. So if you billed more, you participated in a greater share of the revenue. I frequently saw $10-20K quarterly bonuses based entirely off my effort. It was quite motivating.
Because the profit sharing was the same rate for everyone and took in to account the entire company's financials, you were assured that your billable efforts were going to be rewarded on the same scale as the next person.
If you fly too close to the sun and your weekly pay directly relates to the value you put in that week you'd might have job security but you'd have absolutely no income security!
If I'm an employee and I do some great work that brings the company an extra $X per annum, and I ask for a raise of $0.1X the company is welcome to take that out of the $X I made them.
If the company decides to instead take the $0.1X from someplace else, that's their decision not mine - claiming raises are zero-sum is just bullshit to make people feel guilty about asking for a raise.