It's the rocket scientist saying he knows lots of people smarter than him, and obviously hard work and precision are what really matter in rocketry - never mind that estimates put the average IQ in the physical sciences around 125. Or the pro basketball player saying that it's not enough to be the biggest, they key is to train hard and work as a team - never mind that the person saying it is the NBA-average height of 6'7". What these people are actually seeing is that once you have lots of a key trait, other traits gain relevance.
Or to take a less quantifiable example, we can look at something like musical skill. 10,000 hours of practice will (in)famously make you an expert, but Ericsson et al actually found that "time to expertise" is fairly constant in some fields, and massively variable in others. (I seem to remember examples varying by a factor of four?) Skill at a musical instrument can be learned by almost anyone, but some people will see vastly better return on their time investment than others. And if we're looking at professionals, then "just practice harder" ceases to be an option.
None of which means most people are excluded from most roles, or that success is tightly correlated with IQ. But there's a distinct pattern of assessing the importance of some trait after applying a hard filter on that trait, and it does everyone a disservice to pretend that's comparable to a population-level result.