My point is that in certain domains your regular devs can't solve problem, there are some 10x experts who can solve it. For some problems, one 10x expert could

My point is that in certain domains your regular devs can't solve problem, there are some 10x experts who can solve it. For some problems, one 10x expert could be enough, for others you need some team (small), and they will be able to achieve results where NNN randomly hired senior devs from the market won't produce useful product. So, the goal of IC is to become such 10x expert if he wants to grow as engineer and not as manager.