> I've never experienced this mythological 10x rockstar figure that works alone creating impossible to maintain systems, and I've worked closely with dozens of engineers.

I've seen this plenty of times.

Recently I was trying to explain the pros and cons of micro-services, and more importantly, microrepos, with regards to automated testing. The lead engineer that said he'd quit if I colocated the tests with the app.

Same place, they replaced all deploy system with argo, but every environment is pinned against main, which means you can no longer test a change without it going to all environments at the same time.

In both cases, the engineers are actually much higher skilled than average and churn out / lead change, but they'd rather be chasing a fad and just don't care if their changes shit on other parts of the SDLC.