The Cubs won the 2016 World Series, which people tend to forget, on the strength of their core group of young position players. In the years that have followed, however, several of those players have failed to develop further and others who were once viewed as potential heirs have fallen back into more ancillary roles.
Not that there’s anything wrong with developing role-players, since that is actually an integral function of the farm system. I mean, David Bote was never supposed to be the starting third baseman after 2021 or anything like that. But the rationale behind drafting and developing a glut of position players was that they’d matriculate through the system quicker and would provide a faster, more consistent impact.