The article makes the error of assuming that a 10x engineer is 10x because he has arcane knowledge about the intricacies of low level programming. This may be true for some layers of development. In my experience, for application programming, this isn't the "10x skill".
10x engineers are the guys that can grasp the complexities of large systems, enabling them to change them with minimal effort. When prompted with the need to implement a new use case, they understand the whole system or most of the system and thus they can plot the minimal change path to achieve the new functionality. They don't code faster. They code less, leveraging work that is already done.
If you have fewer engineers working on a system, because of better abstraction layers, then you only need the 10x guys. These are the ones that can drive the powerful machines.
What we are witnessing isn't the demise of the 10x engineer. It's the demise of the code monkey.
10x engineers are the guys that can grasp the complexities of large systems, enabling them to change them with minimal effort. When prompted with the need to implement a new use case, they understand the whole system or most of the system and thus they can plot the minimal change path to achieve the new functionality. They don't code faster. They code less, leveraging work that is already done.
If you have fewer engineers working on a system, because of better abstraction layers, then you only need the 10x guys. These are the ones that can drive the powerful machines.
What we are witnessing isn't the demise of the 10x engineer. It's the demise of the code monkey.