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Everybody loves a meritocracy until people realize that they're the ones without merit. I mean you never hear someone say things like:
I think America should be a meritocracy. Ruled by skill rather than personal characteristics or family connections. I mean, I love my son, and he has a great personality. But let's be real: If we live in a meritocracy he'd be stuck in entry-level.
(I framed the hypothetical this way because I want to exclude senior people very secure in their position who are performatively pushing for meritocracy by saying poor kids are excluded from corporate law or whatever).
In my opinion, if you are serious about meritocracy, you figure out and promote objective tests of competency that a) has high test-retest reliability so you know it's measuring something real, b) has high predictive validity for the outcome you are interested in getting, and c) has reasonably high accessibility so you know you're drawing from a wide pool of talent.
For the selection of government officials, the classic Chinese imperial service exam has high (a), low (b), medium (c). For selecting good actors, "Whether your parents are good actors" has maximally high (a), medium-high (b), very low (c). "Whether your startup exited successfully" has low (a), medium-high (b), low (c). The SATs have high (a), medium-low (b), very high (c).
If you're trying to make society more meritocratic, your number 1 priority should be the design and validation of tests of skill that push the Pareto frontier for various aspects of society, and your number 2 priority should be trying to push for greater incorporation of such tests.
Given that ~ no one really does this, I conclude that very few people are serious about moving towards a meritocracy.
And then if we say the bottleneck to meritocracy is mostly c rather than a or b, then in fact it seems like our society is absolutely obsessed with making our institutions highly accessible to as broad a pool of talent as possible. There are people who make a whole career out of just advocating for equality.
There was an interesting Astral Codex 10 thing related to this kind of idea: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart
Mirroring some of the logic in that post, starting from the assumption that neither you nor anyone you know are in the running for a job, (lets say you are hiring an electrician to fix your house) then do you want the person who is going to do a better job or a worse one?
If you are the parent of a child with some kind of developmental problem that means they have terrible hand-eye coordination, you probably don't want your child to be a brain surgeon, because you can see that is a bad idea.
You do want your child to have resources, and respect and so on. But what they have, and what they do, can be (at least in principle) decoupled. In other words, I think that using a meritocratic system to decide who does what (the people who are good at something should do it) is uncontroversial. However, using a meritocratic system to decide who gets what might be a lot more controversial. For example, as an extreme case you could consider disability benefit for somebody with a mental handicap to be vaguely against the "who gets what" type of meritocracy.
Personally I am strongly in favor of the "who does what" meritocracy, but am kind of neutral on the "who gets what" one.
1Canaletto
There's a also a bit of divergence in "has skills/talent/power" and "cares about what you care about". Like, yes, maybe there is a very skilled person for that role, but are they trustworthy/reliable/aligned/have the same priorities? You always face the risk of giving some additional power to already powerful adversarial agent. You should be really careful about that. Maybe more focus on the virtue rather than skill.