Not every pirate ship operates the same my guy, Oda has always shown the first mate and the captain of the three pirate below to be closer in strength.
Oda:
Roger > Ray > Scopper
Shanks > Benn > Roo
Luffy > Zoro > Sanji
Fam this is basically you:
Kaido >>>>>>>>>>>>King > Queen
Big Mom >>>>>>>>>Kat > Smoothie
Luffy >>>>>>>>>>>> Zoro > Sanji
“Not every pirate ship operates the same,” yet you were the one who brought up the comparisons between Roger, Shanks, and Luffy, not me.
That aside, the rest of that is blatantly false. A quarter or so of the way through the series, we had an actual, tangible indication that Luffy was vastly superior to everyone else in his crew, namely that the person he was fighting was actually stared to be twice as strong as the people the next two strongest of the crew were fighting, and ever since then, the gap between the enemies each has faced has only gotten wider.
It works the absolute same way with every crew, excepting Buggy, who’s a gag anyway. An old, sick and dying Whitebeard two shot a guy that Marco couldn’t even hit. Roger contended with that very same individual in his prime, while an old Rayleigh sardonically admitted that he was struggling with someone at the level of the person Old Whitebeard buried in Marineford. Oden watched in awe as Roger and Whitebeard split the sky while he ended up fighting against someone that was presumable around the level of Roger’s second.
At the beginning of Wano, Kaido one shot Luffy who had just walked away from beating the strongest officer in a rival Yonko crew, showing the difference in the gap between Yonko and someone who was even above what a YC1 trends at. Zoro hit Kaido with his strongest attack, left a superficial wound which Kaido shrugged off and then turned his attention to someone who he thought could really fight him, who ended up actually fighting him in
base form and was more to Kaido than the afterthought Zoro turned out to be. Luffy was implied to have broken through Kaido’s full power haki (Kaido acknowledged that he fought Luffy at full strength, or near it, last chapter), which includes advanced CoC, given that the top of Kaido’s club is cracked.
That the captains of the crew are massively stronger than the subordinates in that same crew has been a long established theme in the manga. If Luffy had ill intentions for anyone in his crew, they would be little more than a blood stain on the ground in relatively short order.