"Also, the market well balance itself. If someone is more productive they'll be rewarded more."

I don't think that's true at all. If you don't spend significant amounts of time on self promotion you will not get rewarded but taken for granted.

In one of my early jobs out of college I had a manager who really got this. He knew I was getting my work done, so our 1:1's turned more into career coaching, and his focus was almost always around improving my "visibility" within the org. Looking back, it's hard to say whether he was genuinely interested in helping me get promoted, or if he just wanted to improve his own visibility by proxy, but either way it worked, and the lesson stuck with me.

That's how good managers should be measured though, by the success of their charges

Last I checked, reality doesn't operate based on merit at all. If it did, wages would rise with productivity, but they don't, at least not in the US.

That’s not sufficient. If your deadlines de facto force people to do 12 hour days, I couldn’t care less what you think about office hours.

Meeting deadlines is not function of work productivity and speed. It is purely function of planning and estimation and other management out of control of worker.

Yes, there are slow or lazy workers. Point still stands.

Meritocracies are better, but even there they generally still manage to some degree by the ass-in-seats proxy.

You can also work to eliminate politics to force a market-based outcome, but it's probably less work to get better at the political game.