The underlying principle I've been using to understand this is, no engineer worth their salt will be spending a material amount of time working at an organization that they don't believe utilizes their talents well. The opportunity cost of talented software engineers is much too high in general.

This applies regardless of actual talent and does not guarantee results. I've seen mediocre SWEs with inflated egos jump around because they felt their "world class" talents weren't being put to good use, some unsuccessfully, but some rather successfully fooling their way through the ranks of management. But I've also (more frequently) seen disillusioned, extremely talented engineers leave an org that was paying them obscenely well already, but was making them feel like they were wasting their time, for a shot at a startup dice roll which does not pay off as well (on average).