Building on this, as evidence:

If you have shop where you have the best product-owner in the world, and exact clarity on how you want to build something, how all failures are handled, all the tradeoffs, all the implementation details, all the risks, then product is simple, then your company absolutely can get away with hiring a less than top-tier engineer.

However if you're combining all of those skills/roles into one individual (a staff+ engineer) then of course it's going to be expensive.