I think it depends on the end goal. Specialists are more beneficial to the scalability of the "business" of investment management. You can't have too many unstructured generalists running around and expect to scale up assets in a meaningful way.

I personally believe that a handful of generalists would be far better at generating excess returns on a smaller amount of capital. Understanding practical macro issues makes you a better risk manager, being a better risk manager makes you a better FI investor, being a better FI investor makes you a better equity investor, being a better equity investor, makes you a better allocator between asset classes. Understanding financial planning helps you understand investor psychology, understanding investor psychology helps you understand your own ego, understanding your own ego helps you understand structural issues with markets(like the short term nature of performance evaluation and career risk). I could go on, but it is all interconnected. Even better yet, a broad understanding of the world feeds on itself and creates a flywheel of knowledge.

The takeaway is that our industry is structured and incentivized to favor specialization, since the fee stream in larger, scalable, and less idiosyncratic. Since we have so many specialists, it becomes near impossible to get an informational edge if you are pigeonholed in a niche like US Small Cap industrials where you have 100s of other specialists turning over the same stones as you. In this sense, it creates a paradox where the generalist has an edge with less detailed information due to the ability to piece it all together more effectively.