I've worked in companies with similar frameworks both as a dev and as manager, and it was great. Everything has issues, but the framework gave useful guidance.
I'm not saying it doesn't work. Especially for early careers people, it works absolutely fine because the requirements are reasonable and the scope is largely within the employees control. For later stage employees, it's usefulness tales off massively. When you get to senior levels your ability to fulfil the requirements gets further and further out of your hands and often if you want to pursue the promotional criteria you're actually going to have to deprioritize delivering value to the business to prioritize engineering situations where you can meet the criteria. A lot of the senior goals are basically politics.
Sorry you've worked for such terrible companies.