You don't do a very good job distinguishing corruptions of meritocracy into something else from merit begetting merit. This is really important.

If merit means "you have the intellectual and motivational skills to tackle the most pressing and dire problems facing humanity" that's a very different proposition than if merit means "you were given all the toys and because you won the toy-collection-size contest we decided that we should give you even more toys!".

The latter is simply aristocracy again using toys as a proxy for birthright. The former potentially puts resources in the places that most benefit humanity as a whole.

Now, if we think humanity is doing super-swell, everything's great, then maybe we don't care about whether we're nourishing the key capabilities we need because we don't need any. Otherwise, we'd better decide what's more important: ego or well-being. The ones who side with well-being will prefer actual meritocracy; the ones who side with ego would rather have everyone worse off as long as they get to feel as big as everyone else so won't want either fake or real meritocracy.