Your examples are competitive sports and buying up the right stocks, areas with specific rules and no net output to society. If the top player never existed in a second reality, the 2nd player would be called the top player and no social scientist could identify the harm to the 2nd reality.

If you look at fields where it matters what people produce and the product requires sophisticated and diverse differences, then attempting to rank them too often is catastrophic. For example Microsoft damaged themselves with stack ranking, not just because of immediate social harm, but because everyone had to rank well by showing off skills that were known to be valuable, top, classy, aka the best fads of today. That puts the company on a walk to a local Maxima and unable to compete with a company with engineers who can invest in random skills that just seem interesting without risking a nervous breakdown from the combined costs of signal investment and actual investment.

Fair point about producing something. But why is wrong to say somebody is a great programmer?

Seems most of these articles about programming is a no skill profession are usually coming from somebody promoting a 3-month boot camp.

There are plenty of studies on telling children they are naturally talented, etc and getting them to stop doing the activity for fear of losing evidence of this trait. Many of the "best programmers" I worked with were unproductive and got lost on things that were irrelevant. Engineers I would pick from my old groups tend not to be recognized as great and complemented on how well and timely they put everything together, with an undertone that the greatest programmer could have also done it if only he had time.

As far as submarines stories, I have no idea..