I've thought that many times and always been wrong. At the end of the day, code is just code. After you take the time to understand the environment it's running in, it's not that much different than anything else you could write.

Creating BPF in the first place took a lot of cleverness. Figuring out how to fit it into a massive infrastructure at a place like Facebook took a lot of cleverness. But most of the people actually working on the implementations are just normal software engineers.