Another possibility:
Elite software developers are never unemployed and will rarely or never surface in a resume pile. Mediocre to bad developers will be looking for new jobs fairly often.
We all know that people in Africa work much much harder than your average western person, and yet they get dollars a day while you and me get 100x more.
Life isnt fair and to think that the best always win is plainly wrong, because we both know those poor people in Africa deserve far more than they get.
Some of the most miserable people I've known have been the hardest workers. One example: a friend of mine tried to start a freelance career, but had little experience in the field and rarely reflected on what his clients' needs were. He would work very hard to satisfy his own curiosity about their problems, eschewing deadlines and leaving little time to review his work before delivery. He was among the hardest-working people I've met, yet one of the least accomplished. No one would keep working with him for more than a month.
Correctly identifying which work needs to be done and how is more important than actually working hard. Sisyphean work is not virtuous, no matter how much effort is put forth.
I think more of an issue here is that there is just way too many SWEs and we can’t all be “elite.” In my 30 years in I have worked with roughly same percentage of “elite” as the post is alluding to. The history/structure of just about every project I worked on boils down to needing two distinct group of SWEs, the inovators and closers. The inovators are the “elite” (within the project) and they figure all the shit out. The closers crank it out once all the shit is figured out for them