> However, I'm not quite sure what this has to do with meritocracy.

Meritocracy is one of those nonsense words like "rationalism" or "objectivism" that means "just do the obviously right thing". Like "democratic" and "republic" it's more about the flavor and the mouthfeel than anything concrete.

So I think some US right-wingers have been using "meritocracy" as a fig leaf for hurting their usual victims - Poor people, old people, children, women, queer people, black people, brown people, etc. - While saying "Oh we just think that the most qualified people should be in charge" even though their qualification is like, being a billionaire white supremacist, and not actually going to law school or being a good person at all.

So then the online left wing response is somewhere between "What they're doing isn't really meritocracy, because they've appointed pathetically underqualified justices to the Supreme Court following an obvious agenda that they explicitly said they would follow" (True but too sophisticated to fit on a protest sign) and "Meritocracy is bad, actually" (Too deep in the words of Leftist Theory to gather an audience, but online leftists might agree with it)

So the article is saying "Doing a naive first-order meritocracy results in a system that is ripe for corruption and capture. If we add a lot of randomness, it will resist corruption, and then we'll get the meritocracy we actually want."

The ends justify the means. If it gets people to agree with my vision, I support any wording.