Can you become a great engineer if you are stuck on a middling team

can someone become a great engineer when there isn't impactful work to do? i can't decide if a great engineer finds impactful work ("digs it out") even in a barren landscape or great engineers fall into impactful work which they leverage to find more things that generate value. What is HN consensus on this? The context of this is, i work at a great company, with a highly skilled team but the work my team works on is of very limited impact; i've seen people join later than me who seem to have made much more impact because they landed on the right projects. I question if they have an unnatural capacity to seek out value or if it is hard to seek out value in a barren landscape.