I used to believe this line of thought strongly. But like any "rule", it has limits and presumptions.

Genuinely good and new ideas do have a lot of value, they are just very hard to capture by its inventor, because others can just take it for free.

If the law protects ideas, practicality aside, ideas will be more valuable; if the law don't protect implementation, as seen in some countries, then good implementation does not naturally create more value than copycats.

To give a more timely example, a software idea was not valuable because others can take it for free, while taking someone's implementation to redistribute is illegal, so implementation was valuable. But with LLM advancement, there is now a legal and increasingly cheap way to copy implementations, which will greatly its value going forward.

Maybe soon the golden rule will change to "ideas and executions are a dime a dozen, <something else that is hard/illegal to steal> is what separates success from failure"