What is the point of university rankings? To gratify the human need for someone to dumb down a complex system to a simplistic measure, just so we don't have to

What is the point of university rankings? To gratify the human need for someone to dumb down a complex system to a simplistic measure, just so we don't have to live with the "unbearable" uncertainty that one university may not be strictly superior to another? Once everyone starts optimizing for a metric, that metric ceases to be useful. It's only a matter of how long it takes people to realize that this has happened.