I also think stack-ranking is hard or even impossible to get right. The criteria often favor those people that produce visible work and tend to disfavor people that enable said work (think: producing new features vs. maintenance, writing high-profile code vs. doing the review for those, producing visible output vs. mentoring, ...)
So stack ranking (or any kind of ranking by criteria) tends to nudge people into "let's do what the standard expects us to do" instead of "let's do what makes the team, company and product improve."
With that said, in large companies it can be very hard to determine just who is below whatever standard is set. Instead it becomes more of a game to be liked by your manager or claim credit for work.
By the way, part of working at or above a standard also includes not being an asshole.