With stack ranking a manager must rank the entire team from worst to best and fire / warn the lowest ranked person in the team. Imagine a team with the 10 best people you ever worked with. Now fire the least great of them. You must, because didn't you just say he/she is the worst of the team?

Instead the Netflix process sounds a lot more fair. If everyone is awesome, no one needs to be fired.

I mean, they both sound like dystopian nightmare scenarios tbh.

Yeah. Threads like this whole discussion are why I never want to work for a "big" company. More than about 50 people and you start to get into this kind of managerial/competitive BS. No thanks, I'll take the lower (but still more than sufficient) pay of a small company over that any day.

What part of Netflix's arrangement sounds like a "dystopian nightmare scenario"?

Get fired for no reason because your manager doesn't like you?

I guess a lot of that is helped by "at will" employment in the States. In the UK for example if an employee has worked for 2 years at a company you can't just fire them for no real reason.