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I am annoyed by the article's use of Bill Gates to exemplify the "fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story". Bill Gates and Microsoft is not "every success story". I would be surprised to find even a hardcore believer in an ideologized meritocracy who thought that tail events like Bill Gates and Microsoft didn't have a huge luck component.

Meritocracy-as-strong-just-world-hypothesis is a weak-man argument.

I am a believer in meritocracy. But, I note, I'm not a believer in any ideological big-M Meritocracy. Rather, I think meritocracy is the best practical way we know to organize things. In a liberal society, rather than get everybody to agree on the latent virtues they love the most, I think it makes sense to have demonstrated capability as a common ground evaluation metric. As another poster in the thread suggests, what do you want from your surgeon if not demonstrated capability?