“There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital.”

That’s pretty much the idea of supply side and “trickle down“ economics. People with capital are the most important players. People who do the work are not important and replaceable.