Out of the 50 ish devs I've worked with closely, I've seen two I would say are in the '10x' camp. They were relentless in writing solid, simple, bug-free code, and doing so faster than everyone else. They were also effective in communicating their work. i.e. They weren't head-down in the corner savants.

Their productivity was also significantly more consistent across a range of areas and task complexity, compared with other devs who would slow if working in an unfamiliar area or on a more complex task.

Finally, good (and bad) decision making compounds with software. The right high level approach can pay easily pay of 10x over time just as a bad approach will result in buggy, bad performing software, and multiple rewrites.

In short, this article does not match my experience.