No it's not. Society isn't only an economic system.
At university I remember my friends applying for places at Goldman & McKinsey at ratios of hundreds of applications per job.
These applications took time to make. Cumulatively the thousands of hours spend on interview prep per job may well have exceeded the total hours of work performed each successful job winner in their first year.
It seemed so wasteful to see smart young people wasting their time on regurgitating corporate values & case studies for jobs they never got.
Arguably the winners need the competition to get better so in a sense the losers are there to help select a winner. In other words, knowing who is the best also includes knowing who is not, at least implicitly.
This may also be inevitable. We can imagine a world where someone declares "I'm the best at X", and there is no way to know unless it is tested, which means a competition of some kind, which means losers.
The positive side of meritocracy is that people are free to compete in whatever competition they feel they have a good chance of winning. Additionally, it serves as a learning experience to build your game and eventually become the winner. Equity (or whatever we call equalizing the playing field) is throwing the baby out with the bathwater on this one... no one loses but also no one really wins.
I played college football, you're all sorts of wrong.
Athletics teaches you discipline, teaches you how work in a team, teaches you how to properly exercise/be healthy, ad nauseum. I could go on and on and on.
Your fuckup is thinking the only thing you can get out of athletics is being a pro who makes millions.
Look at me, the failure who went to college on an athletic scholarship for football and walked away with a degree in CS & Math. I should be so ashamed...
For each football player or musician or influencer or artist who makes it big, there are thousands of people spending millions of hours who fail. The same is probably true for developers and entrepreneurs. That time and those lessons really can't be re-purposed, and have no economic value.
I don't think failure is only a lack of merit. probably many of the failures are just as good (or better, but not lucky). But with near-costless distribution of TV rights and the internet, winners drown out others.
When you're part of a company, there's some validation ) that you're doing something useful for others (however twisted and indirect the feedback from product/profit). Otherwise, it's a bit of a waste from the perspective of society.