Twitter is far far away from engineering excellence tho. It hires a lot of engineers to do relatively little. You can feel "productive" without actually producing anything useful for company too. Like, after their whole 2 years of being profitable their revenue steadily increased... but costs increased faster which leads to obvious question "what are those people doing?".

What musk is doing is obviously not sustainable and can ruin technical competency but it is not exactly example of "ruling by performance" as much as him just cleaning house/cost cutting company that was not profitable for more years than profitable.

Also people's motivation are different. Allowing people to self govern and do what they want to makes for happy employees but shit output, example being Valve with it famously flat structure and barely any release. You do need some pressure to make stuff useful for the company and you do need some pressure to actually finish it instead of playing around.

Rewarding innovation sounds good on paper but ends to Googler complex where nobody wants to do maintenance as you won't get pay rise out of it compared to working on some cash cow or something new, if there are no incentives for maintenance.

Cutting low performers no matter what gets you stack ranking and old Microsoft, and team that happened to hire only good people are hurt for no good reason.