The names we have been able to know by now would indicate that theory to be wrong - or Microsoft has a warped idea of what constitutes as a low-performer.
Of the names I know, some were involved in a number of failed projects, e.g. a foldable Windows phone. Perhaps unlucky for them, perhaps low performance.
Reminds me of a glorious post on HN where someone happily blogged about how he wrote some code to tell him who to fire, the answer was him, which meant the code wasn’t quite right. So he picked some people instead. I live for those posts.