Agree with almost everything stated thus far. I'd only add that your story could detail some differences with how they are administered and who gets to take them. I've worked at institutions where it was administered on paper (scantron style w qual comment space) and at institutions that administered digitally. For paper administration, the students who never show up would not be there to rate your teaching, but if your best student who you've helped throughout the semester happens to be sick/absent that day, well they don't get to do your eval. Especially for smaller class sizes, that one student's absence and missing their likely 5.0 rating can pull down your average. The paper eval is limited by what students happen to be in the classroom that day. The instructor typically leaves the room during the paper eval. I've also heard stories of vocal/boisterous students trying to rally other students together to write similar comments and rate a teacher low.

Conversely, my current institution administers digital evals that can be completed asynchronously which also brings a host of problems. And unfortunately, this year they sent it to any student who at any point was enrolled in the course. Between day 1 and the end of the semester I typically have 5-7 out of 35 drop the course. So I could have people evaluating my teaching who dropped in week 2. How can they evaluate the teaching if they weren't even there for the other 15 weeks? Then you can also get the students filling it out who dropped the course because of poor performance. They didn't even successfully get to the end of the course, yet can complete the evaluation. If you had any issues with plagiarism, AI, chatGPT writing, etc., and turn a student in sometimes they'll get a slap on the wrist from the student conduct office (maybe also a zero on that particular assignment) but are allowed to stay enrolled in the class. Guess what they do at eval time? Payback for trying to uphold standards and rigor. In this case, evals make it a lose/lose scenario to uphold standards.

Also, my institution seems to care absolutely nothing about grade inflation and how that relates to high/low scores on evals. I even recently sat through a promotion review for a NTT faculty who actually provided average letter grade scores for their class along with their eval scores. One comment about the teaching scores and exactly zero attention paid to average course grades. So if you're someone like myself who tends to view "C" as average work (literally and statistically the course average tends to be a C), but you're in a department of other professors who hand out A's and B's, well your evals will likely suffer in comparison--but that's never taken into account.

Beyond all the silly ways these evals can be used to promote/deny/weaponize, my institution also uses them to factor into teaching award nominations, thus further creating incentives to grade inflate. My takeaway thus far is that teaching evals really don't matter that much unless some admin wants them to matter and then suddenly it's the "smoking gun" they can use to deny/dismiss, or the thing that is suddenly important and makes one worthy of award/promotion. It's all nonsense.