> People don’t have to be passionate about their job to do really good work.

Even in your core logic here you're proving my point. It's not about being passionate about your job, it's about being passionate about your work, which for me and most of the people I've enjoyed working with the most only has a rough overlap with our jobs. It's a true privileged to work in an area with high paying jobs, but if tech completely crumbled I would remain working in the field so long as the work was relevant to what interests me, regardless of how little it paid.

Doing really good work, in the sense I'm talking about, has little to do with how good you are at your job. In fact, as your job pays more it increasingly requires a distracting loyalty to your employer and the "work" you do tends to increasingly become less interesting. There are very clear exceptions to this, but for the most part I've found it to be the case.

High TC speaks solely to an individuals ability to meet the needs of a high paying employer. I prefer to work with people who are working on something much larger than their job, so tend to work at weirder companies that pay less.

I guess it all comes down to what you define as "talent" (as that was the original point), personally I'm not interested in working with people whose primary talent is being a good employee.