What it comes down to is that there are different types of high performance. Some people are good at just executing tasks given by their manager. Some people are good at being generative, thinking across boundaries, acting autonomously, creating value without direction, etc. A term like "superstar" will get disproportionately applied to someone really good at the latter and rarely someone really good at the former, because the potential impact of the former is typically strictly capped, while the latter is uncapped.