Developer Productivity - Evaluated on individual basis as IC vs in group/team for promotion?

I recently went to a panel event and breakout with directors of engineering at major FAANGMULA co’s and startups that have been around quite sometime (household name brands). 

During the event breakout, I had conversation with people surrounding the idea of metrics used to evaluate lead individual contributors, whether technical or non-technical, but stress the point of “technical excellence” or being considered world class at the top of their friend - friends who are directors at art at companies like Adobe are comparable to research scientists working on foundation models at big name companies who are evaluated on the number of papers published or talks done using AI or other emerging tech product lines. 

During a breakout, one person from Amazon said they only look at group results in aggregate as opposed to individual contribute. Does this really make sense though, aren’t people promoted by an individual basis more than an entire department or team?

I know given the advent of ChatGPT and AI entire teams are being cut (thinking of Salesforce and WorkDay, but that’s mainly for sales being replaced with AI agents), it’s far different than evaluating day, engineers who are building product and foundation models. 

But the response I got was countering my point saying that data engineers and traditional back-end engineers were the ones they referred to like technical excellence didn’t matter to the individual, and they hated how Google and Meta’s quantitative metrics (saying of course we should be evaluated on code quality more than number of commits). It was a very gray area other than when talking about “time for engineers saved on a product” and “time saved to make this workflow more efficient for a massive data migration from a legacy platform to another modern day stack.” I felt a lot of resistance to what I was saying and I’m not sure why since some folks worked at major companies (Netflix, Yelp, Amazon, etc.) and yet some people said they hated even their companies metrics to measure developer productivity even if their company was similar to another’s while another hated it. What is a good way to identify a health culture of a tech company and their developer productivity metrics? (I think deeply about this because interviewing at FAANG this year, I held off on moving forward mainly because I wasn’t ready to commit somewhere with a lower level and salary and had some fear of burnout again after my last startup).