This dynamic is hard to avoid. If you have 1 or 2 people who have more institutional knowledge than the rest of the team, they can burn through more tickets and gain more knowledge through exposure to other people’s problems, which they help with. Then everybody ends up relying on the “hero”, and nobody is really happy about it.

That’s my experience, at least. Cleaner code, separation of responsibilities, and good documentation seem to help though. But I do think a lot of the time people are mistaking “more productive developers” with “devs who got stuck with knowing all the random shit that our horrible codebase relies on” lol