That may or may not be true, of course, but it's an element in your favor either way!
(though fwiw, in my time as a past manager, I found that significant effort counted for a lot - it's cliche but folks who consistently put in extra effort and worked their butts off improved faster than those who relaxed, so they would soon exceed folks who relaxed, even if they had much less of a head start.)
This is true -- but your manager won't always act in your company's exact best interest either! I do think "management are human beings, too" is pretty important to remember.
> The loss of some fraction of X is always going to hurt the company more than your gain in Y will benefit them
I don't think you can assume this is always true. What if X is jQuery and Y is Typescript? Or X is oldLegacyCodebase and Y is newProjectInBurgeoningField?