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.
I think what they mean is scale = repeatability; you can't really say "clone rockstars" but you can do something n-times with a pool of good developers, and leverage = the scaling action; ex: a senior dev could increase their output by 10% or you could introduce some knowledge sharing/mentorship/coaching program where the individual's capacity falls by 10% but they increase an entire team's production by 5%. In a small org where you probably shouldn't have dedicated dev. managers stick with the former; in growing companies the isolated rockstar is still rare and you're trying to move the needle with 50, 100, or more software devs.
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.