Pretty much every company out there has a concept of 'promotion packet', its basically building a case for one's promotion. Of course in a company the budgets are fixed, and so are promotion cycles(yearly in most places). You miss out a turn, you could lose an year, or even risk losing two. In that case its fairly common for managers to build a list of accomplishments(file/packet), and rival managers to build a anti-case/defence for the same. Stack ranking eventually is all about a combination of merit+advocacy+lobbying+counter-lobbying at so many levels that I'd say the engineer who cried wasn't wrong at all.
This is the case in nearly every company. We just wish to delude ourselves that politics is absent at some places.
This sort of power play comes with the territory in a large people structure.
The engineer you describe sounds like they have mental health issues. There may be some teams with terrible managers but all companies have this, and I’ve seen similar or worse situations at Amazon.
Most engineers I worked with were great but there were many engineers that “played the game” in order to get a promotion and more money. It was sickening but if that’s the way the CTO sets the incentive scheme, who can blame an engineer for following it? It’s more on the CTO for setting the terrible culture than the engineers.