I don't think we actually want an effortocracy. Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement? There's no inherent moral worth to futile effort that doesn't actually yield any reward, regardless of how laborious it might be.

Well, i would say that there are two common fallacies w.r.t. meritocracy:

1) Mixing up merit (ability to provide achievement) with effort.

2) Assuming it has anything to do with moral weight. While it primarily targets just decision making and distribution of deserts (rewards).

Why distribution of deserts should be meritocratic? Because that ensure that collaboration is positive-sum for everybody involved. Considering this, fair reward for participation in some group effort has to satisfy a condition that reward is at least as large as a missed opportunity (of collaborating in some other group, individually, or not collaborating at all).

I thought that article was impractical and totally divorced from reality.

Effort can't be fairly measured so in practice the attempts toward "effortocracy" always seem to replace objective systems with a mess of human biases.

Look at college admissions: instead of SAT scores colleges want to look at skin color and how sympathetic your essays sound. That doesn't measure how much a person has overcome in life, it measures a person by how they fit in to the admissions office's prejudices.

The merit based approach, giving academic opportunity to people with a history of academic success, isn't as fair as we want, but it is useful. Broken, gameable, biased measures of effort are neither fair nor useful.