A great engineer is not expected to know how their impact on a 25 person company will be different than a 200 person company. Moreover a great engineer may

A great engineer is not expected to know how their impact on a 25 person company will be different than a 200 person company. Moreover a great engineer may not yet know that not having that impact may be a really important loss to them. A great engineer had bloody well know how their impact will be different, and they'd damn well know how that difference will affect them. Whatever kind of engineer you are referring to is most certainly not great and, worse, they are the kind you should strive to weed out of your hiring process before they end up getting hired and creating a lot of grief for both themselves and the company. Among other things, they have a strong tendency to bring to the table solutions that are mismatched in scale, complexity, delivery style, etc. relative to what would serve the company best. (your 10k point is entirely valid, of course.)