This gets repeated all the time, but it’s easy to overdo it.
It’s true that you’re not going to get promoted if you don’t meet the promotion criteria, so you have to meet the criteria if you want to move up.
However, I’m seeing more and more juniors who think promotion criteria are some game they’re going to min-max, and that I have to promote them if they check certain boxes. They do weird things like ignore their assigned work and spend all their time working on a high-visibility side project, or ignore the way work is assigned and try to do only the things they see as promotion-worthy. Or other times they’re just difficult to work with, unliked by their peers, and avoided by people who don’t want to deal with their politics. Then they can’t understand why we didn’t promote them to team lead despite their work on that one high-profile thing earlier this year.
If you play it too much like a game, it’s obvious and starts to backfire. If you go fully cynical on the process, it’s almost guaranteed to backfire. I’ve seen some people included in layoffs mostly because their constant promotion-seeking competitiveness turned into pervasive toxicity and everyone was looking for the first opportunity to remove them.
Maybe at some companies the pure game theory mode works out, but you have to build relationships and be a good person to work with. At some point, the “game theory” approach just looks like “do a good job and make relationships in the process”.