Whereas chess.com made 2 million USD in revenue last April. Obviously, with that revenue, you have dozens of individuals pulling in different directions wanting to prove themselves and trying to make the platform "better".
So the former is a bazaar. The latter a cathedral. Non comparable.
Isn't that exactly the comparison being made? A "10x" engineer can build a cathedral alone that does what you would otherwise have to hire a whole bazaar of engineers to replicate, at much higher cost.
(Pedantry: You're actually confused on the metaphor here. The Cathedral and the Bazaar was about development methodology, not individual performance. In fact a centralized, corporate product like chess.com would almost certainly be labelled a "Cathedral" by ESR. A "bazaar" is a project built of high-value individual contributions regardless of origin. Whether lichess qualifies or not, I don't know.)
Even in web pages, compare the slickness of lichess.org to chess.com. The former is elegant, individualistic and non-corporate, the latter has the hallmark of too many meetings and divided "team" work.
We get that sometimes management labels a code slinger a 10x engineer, especially if he is also good at conference presentations. This, however, is not the definition on HN.
I've certainly seen more group efforts turn into Rube Goldberg machines than efforts of single persons. The group may understand the Rube Goldberg machine, tell management that the code is perfect, but it is still horrible for outsiders (sometimes deliberately).