This was my experience as well. Another interesting point here is that a top programmer can singlehandedly do tasks that would take a dozen or a hundred regular programmers working together.

I'm confident that if you took a super-rare race condition in a web service and set me to figuring it out in parallel with a team of a few dozen random web coders off Reddit, I'd figure it out first

With factors like that at play you really can't commoditize software engineering. If all the local companies decided to put the squeeze on workers, new companies would spring up, poach the best workers, and crush the old companies. It's happened before, it's happening now, and it'll happen again.