I worked on a 20-ish team of good-but-not-brilliant engineers. Our secret weapon was liking each other and having very low turnover over the course of 10 years.
As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on
Studies have been performed and they come to the conclusion the highest performing teams are the ones with greatest psychological safety:
No matter how much I try to explain to some executives that you don't want the most productive individuals, you want the most productive team, they just don't get it.