Personally I've always prefered 360 over whatever the hell I have. Non-technical people reviewing your performance without knowing what you actually do.

that'd be true if peer reviews carried any weight. Management just seems to ignore it and go with whatever they want anyway. You can't challenge the final ratings so it's a one way street.

What would you prefer to those reviews?

360 degree reviews without explicit curve fitting.

What is or what means “curve”?

HR version: The bell curve of emp performance. (figures collated from workday/slack or some other metrics) So the worst performers are adjusted (read purged) to get to a better standard for the next 'cycle'.

[rant] the tone deafness of the process is in the fact that the company is okay letting perfectly good people go for some self congratulatory metric. The company has a high interview bar, if I may claim so myself. So it's perfectly possible that all 5 people in a team are doing good work. But now you are forced to push someone out because "we only retain the best".

They are okay losing people, okay losing the investment done in them, okay losing the knowledge of systems they acquired for a rule someone in the HR made because they read a study on it. What a bunch of buffoons really.