"Meritocracy was meant as a satire" is brought up as a rebuttal frequently but it's somehow never accompanied by an explanation of how the negatives Young brings up are relevant to the topic at hand. Based on a cursory search, a summary of Young's point in his satire seems to be that meritocracy had the undesirable consequences of demeaning/devaluing those who scored poorly on measures of merit and also triggering a societal arms race as people did whatever they could to improve their own and their children's measured merit, neither of which is salient to this discussion. He doesn't seem to say that meritocracy itself was ineffective. (Somebody please correct me if I am in error here.)

It's also worth noting that the same Wikipedia article that the parent poster points to says that the concept of meritocracy predates Young's coining of the word by centuries and also details its history of successful application by many societies in various eras.