I've been working professionally for over a decade, and it never occurred to me that performance reviews were meant to provide career advice. I thought they were meant to help you understand if your are meeting the expectations for your current capacity. For example, as an engineer at company X, is my development-time vs customer-support-time supposed to be 50/50, 80/20, 20/80, etc.. and how well am I aligning with those specific expectations. I consider this separate from "career advice".
In fact, they're mostly meant as a way for HR to have a paper trail to fire people. That's the only real reason for them to exist, and any good that managers do with them is incidental.
Such a paper trail can be useful in more situations than just firing someone. For example, consider the values of performance reviews in aggregate.
I can think of many reasons why upper management may want to analyze aggregate trends of performance reviews throughout the company, broken down by team, department, manager etc. They can use those trends as data-driven feedback on policy and personnel changes. That is, they can answer questions like “how has our re-org affected overall performance YTD?” Or, “has changing our interviewing methods resulted in higher quality performance reviews of newer employee cohorts?”
You can also use the information to optimise your workforce.
Lets say you're a big home improvement chain opening a new store. You need to get 150 workers to staff the new store.
Do you want to hire 250 people cold and hand the new store off to them? No.
You want to take the top 100 performers from nearby stores, who are busting for a chance to prove themselves, and pepper pot them into the new store, in positions of team leadership, seniors, etc. (And then do a bunch of hiring for the remaining 150, and the 100 to replace the ones you just transferred).
These are the sorts of win-win efficiencies you can pull off if you have good performance data for employees.
(Also astonishingly rare to see in action in the real world, but that's another story :)
Ideally, that should be tracked in near-real-time—either through reporting from a time tracking or project management system, or maintained manually by management. If you're only getting that feedback on an annual basis, it's going to be tough for you to adapt.
