Here's a thought. In psychology, researchers have shown that you can take descriptions of people and through a little bit of math wizardry they can be sorted along two dimensions: likeability and ability.
The likeability/ability distinction keeps popping up in unexpected places in the social sciences. Often researchers are so caught up in their own narrow niche that they're not even aware that they're looking at the likeability/ability distinction. For example, some forty years ago or so, people were making a big distinction about masculine and feminine personality traits. Later they had to change the classification because turns out it's really sexist to think of personality traits being divided into masculine and feminine. So they called them agentic and communal traits, with the understanding that men were socialized to favor agentic traits (a little) and women were socialized to favor communal traits (again, a little; the two sexes overlap on the traits far more than they differ).
Agentic traits are, at root, the "can do" traits. Diligence. Effort. Competence. Dominance. Communal are the "can connect" traits. Love. Empathy. Nurturance.
Really what was happening is that social scientists were catching this likeability/ability distinction. It was a byproduct of a world where men were shunted into power roles and punished for not fitting there, and women were shunted into nurturer roles and punished for not fitting there. Nevermind that women are devastatingly competent, and that men desperately need to feel loved; society knew which dimension it wanted each sex to fit into.
My point is less about gender roles though, and more about the fact that these two dimensions of human activity seem to exist and interact with our world in surprising ways, and I think your article here captures one of them.
Likeability matters. But not everyone is good with people, and not everybody is loved by people. The sorting starts young. There are people who everybody desires to be with and who nobody desires to be with, and if you're in the latter category the damage haunts you for life. You always feel one step behind those who were picked, early on.
I wonder how much of our hustle culture is caused by people who feel like they can't get ahead on one dimension trying to compensate by excelling at the other. Like, people who feel like they don't have the ability to move a single unit forward on the x-axis of being social, scrambling sideways on the y-axis of work, because somewhere along the way they became convinced that work was another way to be valued, which is really what they want most deeply.
It's not that simple of course. Likeability and ability mix and blend and of course everyone has different levels of social skills and work skills, and ultimately a simplified dimensional framework is really just a trick of math, smoothing over the complexities of life to reveal a subtle, mean trend in the noisy realty of life.
But I still think that metaphor of scrambling sideways has great value. How many people out there chase excellence because some frightened, longing part of themselves hopes that if they just become successful enough, then people will come along and say "wow!" and take pride in them and find them lovable?
