I think "The Mythical Man Month" (1975) calls it a "surgical team". If this practice works, I wonder why it isn't common?
Just postulating here, is it because most established businesses cling to whatever they currently do, and the next generation get their start at those big companies, and copy what they're used to? Or, is it because the people who have the responsibility for organizing teams do not come from a technical background, so miss out on reading material that discusses this?
That's not what TMM advocates for surgical teams. IIRC, the surgical team is an A/A+ lead, and a few directee/assistants, some highly specialised (TMM advocated for each team to have a designated tool-maker responsible for creating and maintaining the team's tooling like scripts or codegen)
This organizational system is also referred to as "squads"[1]. We also use it at DSC and it works remarkably well.
1. https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult...