I do agree with basically everything you said, and I am lucky enough to currently work at a very small company that can still do continuous feedback vs periodic review. But I’ve also worked at larger places that have that periodic review, they’ve been varied in terms of good or bad, humanizing or less so. At a certain scale I do think a more formalized process is warranted, at least to be able to bubble up high level stuff to more senior management. I won’t pretend to have perfect solutions for how to do this without boiling people down to one number or metric.

But in terms of hiring, you as a newcomer will be jumping into a codebase and are expected to be able to work in it quickly. A symmetrical relationship for a hiring role might be to be able to find something to talk about in a candidate’s portfolio. Could even have the candidate point out the region of interest beforehand so you can have a good talk about it when the time comes. Not unlike a code review for a PR.