Except no matter what, no engineer functions in a vacuum. In your compression hypothetical, how do you measure the contribution of the engineers who did the code reviews? Who maintain the build environment and test suite that let the "100X" engineer quickly and confidently develop? Who wrote the initial code such that it was possible to add this compression after the fact at all? Who spend their time fixing bugs so the "100X" engineer had bandwidth for this compression project at all? Without those people, the "100X" engineer would have taken longer and made more mistakes, or never even attempted it at all. So it seems unreasonable (and even potentially demoralizing to the rest of the eng team) to call that one engineer a "100X engineer".
Things are accomplished by teams, not individuals.
Things are accomplished by teams, not individuals.