I find it silly they designate these as heroes. Seems simpler to say that most projects are small enough that a single person can do the majority of the work. Not shockingly, most smaller projects don't fail that heavily.

Add in the extra work that collaboration necessarily brings to the table, and it isn't that shocking that things both slow down and get more error prone. At a certain size, though, this is worth the cost of admission.

More, it isn't like we call all projects done by fewer individuals heroes. We have authors, not "writing heroes."

And the author joke is meant to point out that the vast majority of what you read has a single person's name on it, but without the editors and other workers involved, that book would never have come about.