I’ll grant you this: unless you’re actually playing music to sold-out stadiums, “Rock star” is an insipid, meaningless phrase. I’m not trying to debate the definition. Likewise, I’m not interested in the technical qualifications to be a “communicator”. There are clearly few technical standards for fame.

In every other field of engineering, there are standards of knowledge and competency. Software is notable, in that not only are there no standards, but we actually see the glorification of ignorance of even basic knowledge.

There are lots of bad, popular github projects (particularly in the JS universe, where the bar for competency is already quite low) and having a popular project is not prima facie evidence of engineering skill (how many projects was the string-reversing NPM module breaking, again?) Which is to take nothing from the author; I don’t particularly care about his level of skill, nor am I saying his projects are bad. The argument is not about the author.

What I care about is when someone says “hey, I’m ignorant of the basics of the field in which I work, but it’s OK, because I work on a big, famous project.”, and people interpret that to mean that their ignorance is dandy, too. There are dozens of comments to this effect on this page (cf every comment that mentions “impostor syndrome”)

It’s OK to not know things. It’s OK to be a beginner. It’s not OK to excuse yourself from knowing things you really should know as a professional, because someone else got famous without that knowledge.