There are lots of exceptional individual contributors with no desire to ever go into management.

You can be in charge of things without being in charge of people.

Pretty sure that rug wouldn't have prevented downtime.

Not if they didn't uphold the values written on it. But publicly repudiating some values diminishes the chance of upholding them, and failing to uphold those values in particular is what causes downtime.

What did they move away to?

The alternatives to meritocracy are organizing relations of dominance and submission around some other criteria other than competence (typically reproducing established hierarchies of privilege from one generation to the next) or anarchy (in the very general sense of having nobody in charge). We know they didn't choose anarchy — it's not even clear how that would be possible inside a shareholder-owned corporation — and we can see from the results that they didn't put the most competent people in charge, but people outside the company can only guess who they did choose to put in charge.