Doesn't an earnings and guidance miss mean the analysts were wrong?

This has confounded me for some time. Why does a stock price depend so heavily on whether the company meets expectations of analysts who are external to company events? If earnings come in below expectations, why does that mean that the company underperformed rather than mean the analysts erred and over-expected?

To a layman like myself, earnings and guidance expectations seem like arbitrary numbers that quarterly numbers should land around, but not a binary cut-off for pass-fail performance.

Can anyone help explain the validity of this system to me?