I'm a good cook, but compared to Wolfgang Puck, I make shit on a shingle look brilliant. You could hire 100's of me and not get a decent restaurant. After so many decades as a programmer, there are enormous gaps between programmers in their ability to deliver quality. Calling something 10x is not a measurable quantity, but watching quality delivery over and over gives you the impression; the number is arbitrary.

But, I think, you should consider that it's 10x at McDonald's vs 1x at a good restaurant and 9 days eating nothing at all.

Yes, this is obviously just considering utility at a higher level of the hierarchy of needs, not pure subsistence. Otherwise everyone should just be slurping Soylent all the time I guess.

only if you think that any organization that hires a 10X engineer doesn't hire any 1X engineers.