All of the members could still rank up they just have to prove that they are worth it,
They just have to prove that they aren't one of those spammer's who are just spamming nonsense in this forum.
And I think if their comment,thread or post is really informative or helpful there would be a forum member that would surely give them a merit.
If the mechanic was more graceful than it is, sure- but from a UI perspective, it's actually a lot of effort to award merit, and that means it's likely to only be used for merit farming- essentially a digital circlejerk probably coordinated on Telegram channels.
I don't think it solves the problem it's trying to address, and may actually make it worse. I get the need to lessen administrative burden (and I totally agree with that, it's becoming a bit of a shitshow for them), but I actually think this might have the opposite effect. If they'd opened the proposal to public scrutiny (say as a Request for Comments), this would have been a lot smoother and likely would look and function a lot differently. Instead, it's now become technical debt that'll be hard to redesign effectively.