Or it’s just the largely self-taught intrinsically curious autodidact developers and engineers have always been 10x and the “average” person in it for the paycheck is really what a 1xer has always actually been.

I think the industry highly skewed towards the former back in the 90s (and earlier!) when I first entered it. There certainly were vast differences between the best and the worst, but nothing like the gigantic gulf there is today between say a competent kernel driver developer who can get code mainstreamed into Linux vs. a boot camp style disinterested frontend dev who leet coded and brute forced themselves into a FAANG job.

Working closely with other white collar “generic” jobs and the folks who just show up each day and are not interested in the fundamentals at all make me believe this is kind of the baseline for most industries.

Most folks are in it for the money and are happy to just be good enough to not be fired. Since most middle management is utterly incompetent at performance management the results tend to not be great for pretty much the entire corporate white collar industries. A stellar manager though really stands out in such situations, but they are so rare many won’t work for or with one their entire career.