Agree that there is probably room for improvement to such a process and still a great amount of subjectivity required and a presumption of good faith participants who aren't actively gaming the numbers.
In general though even if some developers are gravitating to only projects that are simple/trivial, those wouldn't necessarily be differentiators because such projects would have checkmarks by other developers as well.
Also it can help to have the Product Management team rank the features in terms of strategic importance and criticality to the functioning of the company.
I'd say the biggest benefit of such a spreadsheet is to provide visibility to leadership about the bus factor of the team. Too often the critical projects are really only maintained by a few team members. There's no incentive for new team members to learn the "legacy" projects versus creating their own pet projec. Then the inevitable RIF or transition happens and the lack of long term support becomes an issue.
> Couldn't there then be a risk that now some people want to avoid higher risk projects, and just build the simpler features, and get more checkmarks
This is kinda a well known phenomena in medicine[0]. Same with lawyers. I'm just reminded of this scene from Silicon Valley[1]. It's messed up and why everyone needs to be very careful with metrics and remember that metrics are only guides, not targets.
What if the table in fact shows which people are best at dodging the hard work
Combined with showing who has the most friends in the office (giving checkmarks to features built by one's friends)