I think the claim about "winner take all" games is about things which follow power law distributions. If a large fraction of all possible rewards go to a small

I think the claim about "winner take all" games is about things which follow power law distributions. If a large fraction of all possible rewards go to a small fraction of participants, its not too out there to imagine a small number of extreme outliers dominating. Lots of things appear to work this way; eg income or number of streams to songs or book sales. Relating this back to OP's point, almost everything where network interactions come into play appears to be power law distributed, due to the Chinese restaurant process[0]. So as the world scales, we see the effects of power law distributions for larger and larger networks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process