Unfortunately management only saw the “picks ambitious tasks” and were blind to everything else.
You can’t really blame people for responding to absurd incentives in absurd ways.
Being the person who comes up with mediocre solutions to hard problems is way more impressive than the guy who has expertly designed solutions to easy problems. One of the devs on my team is like that. Everything he writes is like 30% broken from the get go but all his stuff ships and nobody else has the moxy to blindly charge into the unknown and not get stuck because their afraid to cut themselves on edge cases.
There's nothing like being annoyed at waiting for a blocker to motivate me to do the dishes. Second best motivation is being in a boring meeting I'm not really needed in.
I complained about a bug that blocked our CI for a week, which I'd shepherded around; that the company needs people to be prepared to work on things that they "don't own" because surprise, we don't have anyone assigned to owning the interaction of those six systems! Actual response: well, you didn't have to do that work.
Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet.