I guess Peopleware couldn't get every single thing right.
A hospital model may be a good idea. One where you have a senior programmer and many junior ones doing most tasks isn't. IMO, something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines, and maybe a couple of juniors composing the team has much higher chances of success.
> something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines
That is not how hospitals work. The surgery departement won't have a crack team of different disciplines to teach budding surgeons everything. They'll only have veteran surgeons to guide less-experienced surgeons.
What you will have is interdepartmental cooperation / hand-off, and you'll have multi-discipline roles like surgical oncologist.
In the same way, you won't have devops seniors training front-end juniors.
A surgery team has a surgeon an anesthesiologist, a nurse specialized on material handling overseeing the material usage in the procedure, maybe a nurse specialized on equipment handling. None of those people are junior or subordinated to the others.