I've seen this happen to many managers at FAANG. You're promised 10 people for a project next year, you get 4. So you cut, manage, optimize, engineer, and hustle to get something done and working. Management above you sees this as relative success, and validates that they were right not to give you more people. Disillusionment sets in, the team quits or transfers, you get bad reviews.
The next year, you're fired or transferred, and the new guy comes in, he gets 10 people, saves the day and gets high praise. He gets good reviews and maybe a promotion. You look back with resentment. The problem wouldn't have been there if they had given you the resources you said you need. If you had 10 people, you also could have saved the day.
This is the sickness of large organizations and non-technical management. I have rarely seen organizations not run by owners spend the $1 on prevention today, they almost always elect for the $10 for a fix later.
If you need 10 people to do a job, and you get 4, the job should fail. Your systems should be going down. Don't sabotage, but upper management needs to see, not hear about, failure. Update deliverable timelines form 6 months to 18 months or just cancel new projects all together, change your SLA's from 99.9% to 90%. Change your ticket response times from 30 minutes to 12 hours or best effort business hours.
You'll either get the resources, get attention for reprioritization, or learn that your job isn't a real priority.
What's really needed are leaders who recognize hero culture for what it is and are willing to move away from it. That's hard to do, in large part because managers benefit from it in the short-term and many will move on before the long-term costs become apparent. Given your previous example: Every manager wants to be the "winner" who gets the job done with 10 people, but what's unfortunate is that many of them will move up to the next level and claim that they would have success even with just 4 "good" people (re: heroes). So their replacement will get 4 people and the cycle will continue.
I mainly switched because I kept hitting the salary cap for cyber roles as a government contractor and got tired of being asked to move on to new contracts.
The transition has been difficult. Sales has a huge learning curve and even more so in government contracting. Selling to the government is it's own animal, since you can't talk to your customer directly (in most cases). So you have to do a lot of work to influence your bids indirectly.
I'm still undecided about whether I made the right move. I like having more influence in the day-to-day management of my org, but I jumped shipped right before remote work options and tech pay exploded, so a lot of my old tech friends are making as much money or more than I am for a lot less work.