Rands in Repose (Michael Lopp) talks about this in his book "Managing Humans" as volatiles and stables, the former being largely analogous to rockstars. He (I believe accurately) describes how volatiles ignite the fire that leads to big change, then become stable around the new solution (or leave) and get disrupted by new volatiles. It's very similar to Clayton Christensen's work on disruptors.

If you're a manager, the math of having true rockstars on your team rarely works. They take more effort to manage yet produce fractional more output (they might be 10x better than a terrible developer but they're not multiples of solid devs). So I'm way further ahead if I can focus my efforts on improving broad-based productivity 5-10% than if I cater to my rare unicorns that are 30-50% better than my average team. Something I think ICs often overlook is a focus on leverage and scale to drive big improvements.