The corporations and executives are already winning if you swallowed the concept of 'rockstar' engineer. Sure there are more and less experienced engineers, but even interns can and often do provide good input and spot mistakes made by seniors. The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (and making many mistakes in the process).
For the most part there aren’t 10x engineers
But there are certainly 0.1x engineers
The study that defined the 10x engineer defined him as 10x as good as the worst engineer. If there is a 0.1x engineer, and a 1x engineer, that 1x engineer is the very definition of a 10x engineer.
I've long thought a 10x engineer is one with just the right amount of analysis paralysis - not too much or too little. It's not that they're 10x engineers, it's that everyone else is 0.1x due to a confluence of reasons. And the ones we call 0.1x are 0.01x.
There certainly are 10x engineers just that they get most of the x from turning down bad ideas and saving work.
and -10x
Even if we forget "rockstar", there are certainly different levels of engineers. More experience doesn't automatically mean better either. That is not to say experience doesn't matter. It matters quite a bit. Sure , good interns can sometimes have good feedback or spot mistakes. But not consistently enough.
All of this to say that it's not just experience that makes one a better engineer.
Experience is one of the only objective signals we have, but you're right it's not the only one. I've seen plenty great junior engineers and interns, and plenty of incompetent staff/principal engineers.