Yup. There is no doubt individual effort matters. But the extent to which it matters is sharply constrained by systemic factors. And escape from those factors is often about luck, not effort.

I'll use myself as an example. Going by parents, I do way better than one would expect. But I was lucky to be born into a time where my neuroatypicality was suddenly useful in an industry big enough that it created social upheaval and space for some to rise. Lucky indeed; 50 years earlier I would have made a mediocre car mechanic, somebody who only worked hard on the rare car problem that was interesting.

And timing aside, two other lucky items pointed me at tech. One was getting an early computer (TRS-80 CoCo) as a gift from a well-off friend of my mom's. The other was my dad being a software developer himself. Which only happened because in the mid 1960s his dad was an exec at an insurance company that had just rented one of these newfangled minicomputers but didn't know what to do with it. My dad didn't have any training, but he was a) smart and b) a bad student in college, so my grandfather used his connections to try him out on computing. Something that was only possible because they were white; Milwaukee had no black insurance executives in 1965.

Have I worked hard at points? Sure. Have I worked half as hard as a restaurant prep cook or a single mom who cleans offices at night? Nope. Indeed, the hardest times I worked were at the shittiest, lowest-paying jobs. Working the grill at McDonald's. Running an injection molding press to make mirror rims for cars I couldn't possibly afford. Since getting into tech my life has been comparatively cushy, and getting cushier. Way better than what my middle-school automated career counseling service suggested I was destined for: bowling pin machine mechanic.