Games with small teams probably have a much easier time creating a game they are passionate about even if the scope of the game has to be smaller.
It's that making ambitious games is hard, and if your organization doesn't have good engineering practices, good project management, a clear achievable vision, a realistic timeline, and capable team members, you will have difficulty succeeding.
And even with less ambitious games, studios fail all the time for the same reasons. It's not just the AAA games.
Clearly a smaller team with a smaller scope has an easier time because as you increase headcount, communication overhead increases exponentially, and bigger teams are usually trying more technically difficult things than a smaller team would try to tackle.
When there's a single leader who's highly motivated to do critically acclaimed work, it signals to talent that this is a project aimed at critically acclaimed work.
Now, said auteur also makes great margin calls and leadership decisions.
But keep in mind it's not just "great man syndrome."
The film industry has learnt through many trials and errors it has to happen this way.
Software hasn't.
Films are an exercise in getting everything you need in your 70 or so days of filming. The days you've rented the exorbitantly expensive cameras, trailers, lights, etc.
Games are similar, except over a few years.
Only the auteur leadership model is able to make those project management tradeoffs quickly, under a lot of stress, and well, to deliver high quality output.
The Civ games have been around for a while, then it became "Sid Meier's Civilization". Not because he went back in time and did more work on Civ, but because he built his rep and wanted to use it to sell a couple of more copies.