The author confuses successful products with high performing tech and high performing engineers. I’ve met many brilliant indie engineers that build highly performant code that almost no one knows about yet it provides these people with a steady stream of income and they would never work at faang or unicorns.

I don't see this claim being made anywhere. The article claims the opposite: the best performers on their technical interview happen to be from Dropbox/Google etc.

I was thinking the best performers may very well be at one of those companies, but there's a pretty good chance that they never did any kind of coding interview. Maybe they were hired through a merger or acquisition or perhaps their reputation or portfolio is more than enough.