For most engineers, competition are non existent. Just simply keeping up with tech stack and delivering solutions is enough to place in top 1% of engineers.
Yes, 1x engineers are just as valuable and rare as 10x or 100x engineers. Because vast majority of engineers, including engineers in FAANG companies, are negative producers.
Simply being in it for paycheck and being 1x engineers will have long lucrative career.
Can confirm from 2 decades of experience as a dev. It's not rare to find negative ROI devs. I used to be one even.
As a matter of fact, current team is still fixing tech debt left by 2 previous devs.
It's infuriating because most of the tech debt is related to lazyness, not lack of competence. They had all the time in the world, all attention whenever necessary, PRs reviews from senior devs and still decided to cut corners most of the times. Some got past Pull Request reviews and we are left to deal with the mess.
On the other hand some devs that are not very technically experienced but are proactive and have positive personality makes great additions despite not knowing much.