If programmers were paid in proportion to their productivity most (maybe 80%) would starve to death. They would be better off providing data entry for minimum wage. On the other hand, those that are productive (aren't afraid to write original software) would be lavishly rewarded beyond most of our imaginations. Their output doesn't even have to be high quality.

This would resoundingly benefit everybody. People doing a job just to put an unqualified body in a seat are an economic drag. Their contributions are often a net negative purely existing to qualify their own existence. For example, does the user actually want 10mb of JS executing for 10 seconds on every page load just to put a few lines of text on the screen? Does the user care that it took a large team of software engineers to pull that off and waste their time without which those software engineers would have to do something else? No, the user won't shed a tear.

Yes, there are 10x developers. Yes, most software developers have no idea what a 10x developer is and are absolutely incapable of recognizing one even when working adjacent to one.

The only valid question is why the industry tolerates, and even infantilizes, hiring people not qualified to do this work at their own expense. The simple answer, also economically valid, is because it takes them less effort to make a knowingly bad decision than confront the risk of defining what comprises valid selection criteria.