The problem is the powerful make the rules, but don't abide by them. What starts off as a meritocracy quickly turns into this growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Like we have now.

I don't think this would ever be achievable. It also sounds like a broader form of technocracy (to my very much unqualified brain)

Do I believe it could work? Maybe.
Do I believe it's been seriously tried to a significant degree? Nah.

"Wherever you go, there you are" also applies to the human condition and any kind of whatever-cracy. At the end of the day, people are people and a lot of people suck, there's no fix for that.

Don't organisations already follow this? Atleast for their workers.
People getting into a public or private job have to show that they are eligible.

Regarding meritocracy at level of society:
I think it's going to be difficult in reality.

1. Who appraises the merit of people? Who defines, maintains and updates the standards/methods used for the appraisal?
2. Is there a system for continuous quality check? It'd be needed to maintain the system as a meritocracy.
3. How is the quality check system preserved in the system?
4. Who appraises those who appraise?

In the case of an organisation, the leaders/owners of the org can choose workers with merit. But the owners themselves are not appraised, right? Unless they are in some co-operative org or so.

Perfect meritocracy seems very difficult to implement for the whole of society.

I think democracy(which gives due importance to scientific temper and obviously human life) is a decent enough system. We can iterate on it to bring up the merit in the society and its people as a whole

Nobody is able to speak for other people. This just doesnt work.

Its just laziness if people prefer to have others speak for themselves.

Anarchy is the only system where nobody can hide because "it was not their decision" and where nobody has the right to "decide for other people".

I mean, are you good at gifts? If you dont know what a person wants to get as gifts, how do you want to know exactly what decisions they would make?

Absolutely not. Demographic data shows it's shit, income distribution data is best explained by a random walk process (neat graphic explainer here), and all the data on startups and investing show that there's no free lunch; capitalism actually does ensure everything gives the same steady return on average.

Every rich person won some sort of lottery. Even the bona-fide engineers are never the only ones that could have invented whatever thing - as technical person myself.

Wildly untenable concept in modern society...

I'm sure it would work great in a video game or something, but In the real world, this shit goes crony AF guaranteed.

We don't measure aptitude or ability in our society, we absolutely suck at it. A person's ability is measured by what pedigree they purchased at degrees R us, or worse, by how articulate and verbose they were when typing a resume. Occasionally, ability is measured by how well someone likes a person even...

Competence is valued in a very select few enterprises. Trades, IT, and at higher echelons, math nerds... That's about it...