Ah, anyway, I was hoping to find a little disclaimer somewhere saying not to take this exercise too seriously.
And I think beyond that, the answer is to try to work hard to change your life circumstances (where you live, how much effort you put into your network, what skills you develop, how often you switch jobs) so that if you do want to make lateral moves within roughly the same role, it's straightforward. This heavily de-risks the possibility of getting stuck with people who aren't great. It might be common, but it's /not/ every team, it's /not/ every company. The labor market is still very favorable for technologists. Using the market momentum to find your way into a healthy team environment at a company with a healthy culture is highly advised!
Every ineffective manager that I've ever known thinks that they can coach people into being more productive, better team members... but in the end those managers simply pat themselves on the back while the employee goes on causing headaches for the rest of the team.
However, there is also a correalation between how difficult/toxic a team member is and how well they respond to coaching. At this point I think if a truly difficult team member responded to coaching, they probably would have stopped being difficult earlier in their career, because someone else would have told them to knock it off.
The only thing I've seen work there is being embedded into a culture that uniformally corrects the problematic behavior, and even that is a crapshoot.
However, that doesn't change my experience that most people do want to get better and do respond to help.