>that people should be based on their negotiating skills, then you also support paying people regardless of their performance

Nah, it's finer grained than that. Negotiating skills are the cherry on top, but they are dependent on performance.

You can't negotiate if you don't have offer a level of performance that justifies the negotiation.

You won't even get the interview (and therefore opportunity to negotiate) without the "performance" i.e. actual work related skills.

We're not discussing a binary, though. Negotiating skills can't completely untether compensation from qualification/performance, but they absolutely loosen the two. If I am a junior employee who is skilled at negotiating comparing my salary with a senior employee who is not, the delta will be far smaller than if our qualifications were the same but our negotiating skills were reversed.

We are discussing a binary:

Participating in interview *: 0 or 1

Participating in negotiation for a higher income: 0 or 1

* Note: An interview is only obtained based on past performance (that is, a person previously performed work at a certain level).

Negotiating skills is just recognizing your true value to the business. You need to actually have value (performance) to negotiate that higher salary.

I don't think that's true because your negotiating power comes from how valuable you are, not only on your "negotiating skills."