In the observation that kicked off the meme, a 10x engineer was someone who was 10x more productive than the least productive members of the team, not 10x more productive than the average.
Yeah. If the least productive member of the team is clueless and gets nothing done, then a competent programmer is literally infinitely more productive than that. It's not a very well-calibrated metric.
That is a rigged comparison but too often that matches reality. Everyone in the team works on massive Big Balls Of Mud in C#, ASP.NET. One guy in the team builds a new app in Python with Django in one tenth the time it would take to do it in C#/ASP.NET. Is this guy a rock star? Or is this a symptom of a toxic IT environment created by incompetent management who simply have no concept of "accidental complexity" and "technical debt".
So many enterprise IT shops are effectively bankrupt due to technical debt and the only thing propping them up is the cash influx of the enterprise that owns them. This affects J2EE shops just as much as .NET ones.
And the multicore future, end of Moore's law, has effectively made all of their software, both built software and purchased software, obsolete. It is not a pretty picture, but we will see this all play out over the next few years. That is far more important than chasing after the fantasy of the 10x white knight who will save you.
