How is grading by curve fair at all? Are there any arguments in favor of it?
My firm belief and policy is that a student's grade should depend on their own efforts and nothing else. In that case, curving the class is actually just wrong.
But my grading policy is pretty different from most. First, I use (used, actually, as I'm retired) cumulative grading. Every student task was assigned a point value and those added to, say, 1000. If you did a 100 point task, you might get 90 points based on assessments of quality. The breaks between grades were defined, say 900 to earn an A.
Second, I permitted rework if a student earned less than they expected to earn, but rework only got you back part of the lost marks. Therefore, I didn't get complaints about strict grading. &quot;If you want more points on this, do a better job of it&quot;. This also allowed me to encourage students to do better work and rethink poor assumptions.
Third, I assumed that I wasn't perfect and that I occasionally was overly strict, so a student never missed a final grade by what I considered an infinitesimal amount. 899 points didn't mean a B.
When I came time to assign final grades, I'd look at the earned distribution and make a decision whether that represented what I thought they had actually learned and I might adjust all grades upwards (only upwards) a few points if I thought that, at that point I'd been too strict along the way.
I had the reputation of being very demanding, and I was, both in the quantity and difficult of work. But I was just a bit less strict than my reputation. Students after the last class were never disappointed when they saw their final grade. They were able to compute it along the way, and they might learn that they did a bit better than their expectations.

No student should suffer in a class simply because, just by chance, there are a number of genius level other students.
Curving, is, I think, an admission of failure of the admissions system itself, which tries to predict that admitted students will be successful. If the system is set up so that some are guaranteed to fail then something is extremely wrong.
Expecting that the distribution from one year to another should be the same in an individual course is also foolish. The students aren't randomly selected from a known distribution in large enough numbers (for a single class) that statistical assumptions have any validity. Some years the students just work harder than in others. Some years they have to deal with things (pandemics, say) that make their work much more difficult.
Grade individuals, based on their performance. Make it possible that the performance can be good or can improve. Don't assume that the students in your class don't really need to be there. Be a teacher, not a grader.

Also see this question and my answer there.

Note: To make rework possible and not overly burdensome on the grader, students turned in work on paper. For rework they also turned in (in a folder) all of the previous versions that had been commented by the grader. They also highlighted, in the new work, changes to the most recent version. It was easy and quick to see if additional points should be awarded and easy to mark up the latest document with suggestions, etc.
This may not scale beyond 30 students per grader, I realize. I know that at 40, scale starts to be an issue.