As someone who often submits significantly more PRs (without using AI) than teammates, it's not exactly a skill delta. Yes that helps but it's often only a piece of the puzzle. The other ingredients include motivations and culture. In such cases, something else is the driving force, such as posturing for promotion, stability, etc. My current team is massively low performing. Management pays some lip service to all the problems, but also runs things in a way that discourages high performance. It's not a good fit for me, as I want to tackle challenges head on, improve the environment, be productive, embrace change. I'm also very comfortable with the code base as well as the code review process, but I'm surrounded by "seniors" who do not know how to code review, and who are happy to drag their feet and spin their wheels for months before pushing out small PRs that hurt my brain. How can that little work be shown after months, barely functional at best?

We had better management for a few months, and many on the team were actually quickly closing the skill gap with me, but we had another shuffle and things are stupid once more.

So I'd offer that's option 3. (There's always a third option to any suggested either-or fallacy.)