I'm not claiming to be a 10x developer or anything like that, but I have a related story to share:

Once I had to tweak a 7000 line signal generator (ie spits out wav files) written in Java. It had a mind boggling structure, and I'm sure whoever wrote it was a mad genius of some kind.

I rewrote it in less than 100 lines of Python, where each signal primitive was basically a few lines of code max, which you can functionally combine.

Since this new program was not even 100 lines long, we were able to do a LOT more with it, and in a super flexible manner.

It's one of my happiest accomplishments.

And then you encounter the 10x programmer, who is not afraid to throw the bullshit code away and write it in a way that is easy to manage for other devs. I'd say this is really a more realistic example of a 10x programmer. Most programmers are just afraid of asking the "why" question and the actually acting if there is no good answer.