Yep. Somehow I want to emphasize that Git-like quality isn't attained through extreme heroic efforts, but through having enough experience and good taste (and what else?) to get to the essence of the problem...
Domain knowledge, or the genius to reinvent it from scratch (CAS and merkle trees for Git)
"heroic" is ill-defined, so don't know about that, but the effort was arguably extreme, in the sense that Linux and git are among the best at what they do. Lots of other people who might have the same experience and abilities did not achieve things like that. I just don't see why you would want to minimize the achievement in any way.