...but also completely disingenuous.
Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associates with similar peers.
Student Y is one of n siblings to an illegal immigrant single mom with little to no formal education who works two minimum wage jobs so has no time to help her kids even though she desperately wants to. Y might even be working too just to enable the family to get by, leaving no time for studies at home or homework. (effectively having more work ethic than X, just not for school) Y lives in a dangerous area with sirens blaring and dogs barking all hours of the night and many of his peers are involved with gangs.
Granted, these are obviously exaggerated and hypothetical stereotypes, which I don't really want to contribute to perpetuating, but they illustrate a point. You don't exactly have to be some kind of bleeding heart social justice activist to see how unfair it is to Z to be "objectively graded" as lacking "performance" when compared to X.
A common objection is "well how are we going to indicate who is the best candidate for a given university admission or job if we don't have grades or other objective measure to filter out the best people!??!???"
But... that's the point we're trying to make: current grades and other "objective measures" DON'T filter out the "best". To an overwhelming degree, they're just proxies for other things. Surely universities and employers can and will find better ways to assess candidates. (or, if that's what they want to insist on continuing to do, filter out underprivileged people, just like they do now)
TLDR the delusion that grades are some kind of objective meritocracy is ridiculous the sooner it's done away with the better.
To be clear, schools can't fix all the worlds injustices. Life is unfair and realistically we may never be able to fix that. But we can stop doing this that are making it blatantly more unfair than it has to be...
Same. For me, though, it took going back and becoming a teacher to see how privileged I was. Mom was a teacher, both parents at home and contributed to my education from an early age (like, doing math as soon as I could talk "How many people are in the car? What if your grandparents were here? Your uncle? What if we took the grandparents away?", etc), etc. My friend group was all in the same situation. Two parents at home, etc. It wasn't until I came back to the school that I realized how insulated I had been and how it wasn't me that was the reason I did so well (Valedictorian), but the support I had behind me that enabled me to do it.
I'm also a teacher and, although you can teach college without knowing any formal pedagogical methods, I've at least looked into the works of people like Louis Benezet (setup a middle school without formal arithmetic) and Ranciere (The Ignorant Schoolmaster). And I've come to the conclusion that backing away from homogenized curricula most hurts 1) bad teachers and 2) textbook companies.