Experiments in reducing the grade-centricness of universities have mostly foundered on employer objections. UC Santa Cruz for a while was famous for giving narrative evaluations instead of grades. Clases were formally graded pass/fail to indicate whether you met the minimum requirements to move on, and then in either case the professor wrote a one-page or so explanation of what you did well and poorly in the class, some advice, etc. In a sense the evaluation was still quite rigorous, just not boiled down to a single letter.
Companies hated this because they wanted to know which students had the 4.0 GPAs, and which had the 2.0 GPAs: a string of passes plus a stack of narrative reports didn't fit their evaluation model. So UCSC moved to allowing students who wanted to receive a grade along with the evaluation to opt into an A/B/C/D/F grading model alongside the narrative evaluation; eventually they made that mandatory; and finally just dropped the narrative evaluations.
You would probably just have recruiters who would grade candidates on the basis of how many times the word "excellent" appeared on the report or similar, no doubt startups would pop up offering machine learning type solutions to these problems as well.
Not to mention it would be easier to corrupt the system as there would be more plausible deniability if a professor simply "forgot" to include some negative factors on the report.
Much easier just to filter numerically based on grade. Also most of the smart people who do enjoy the learning as an end in itself should know the material well enough to do well in an exam anyway and just view the process of revising for the exam and tweaking their coursework for good marks as "playing the game".
I'm not convinced that academics are better qualified to predict the needs of society regards knowledge and education any more than the free market is.
Regards to helping students evaluate themselves , there is no reason that a professor cannot provide feedback in addition to assigning grades indeed I'm sure many would be happy to and it's more likely a case that many students are simply happy to get their grade and move on rather than evaluate themselves.
On the contrary, I'm pretty sure the free market is the last thing qualified for that. It will always be a race to the bottom, and that's not something education should be.
And while this more of a philosophical point than anything, I think that this form of competitiveness ("look, I'm better than you") is a major problem of today's society. Education should teach to work together, not against each other.