While that's true, it is also reliant on the fact that the manager of your immediate team be able to effectively argue for your team members during the stack-ranking meeting. If you happen to have a manager that ends up being too reticent, many of the underperforming scores could end up being disproportionately assigned to your team.

You're definitely right on that. However, if your manager isn't willing or able to effectively argue for your team members, it doesn't matter what the review system is: you'll still get screwed.

Read the article closely it says "Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees". Are you saying the employees were lying or that the interviewee misheard? Its not possible to argue against this point.

Also, what you say about a sufficiently large group never happens. What actually happens is each lower level manager is forced to rank his or her team members along the curve so as to make the process "fair". And inevitably, this gives rise to a large host of harmful behaviors - slacking off on work by people who have low self esteem as they will get ranked low "anyways", grandstanding, people trying to take credit for others work, infighting, corporate politics, people waking up and starting to work hard closer to the appraisal cycle to capitalize on the "recency effect", dysfunctional teams that deliver only because of heroic efforts from a couple of the team members.

Any system can be gamed this one has got gamed out long ago, my experience - I have seen it do nothing but harm in every single case.