Its interesting that throughout my career I've found it has been challenging to communicate group and individual contribution in meaningful ways to people without the whole picture. That is especially true when the activities don't translate directly to sales revenue.
As a result, you get people who leave who were much more important to the organization than the organization understood and the folks left behind are stuck trying to recover and make up the loss.
If there was a manager measure of 'OQ' (organizational quotient) it would measure the ability to recognize and optimize the net productive energy of an organization. Groups without that awareness seem to wither as they pursue one or two 10x employees without regard to how to support their activities.
As you say, zero impact to people in terms of their performance reviews (which were a topic of discussion in their own, each employee having to write a mini-manifesto for their year ahead) and kinda became a popularity contest where people were giving kudos to their office buddies.
And don't get me started on the people that left heart stickers with messages like "thank you for starting the best company in the world" on Benioff's profile.
Another issue is that tech orgs are extremely political. There was one person who had single-handedly created a viable migration path from the company's aging proprietary framework to .NET MVC5, but no kudos there. Just lots of pushback and skepticism.
You could give as many kudos as you wanted, and it had zero impact on performance appraisal/raises, but it sure gave people the warm and fuzzies reading about random mini-stories of someone going above and beyond here and there.
I think it was pretty effective at fostering a culture of collaboration, and it also helped surface issues-masked-as-heroics, such as people working chronically late on some projects. It also gave greater visibility to the existence and importance of the various departments, which one might not have gotten an appreciation of otherwise.