I didn't mean it as such.

> in the midst of doing his best work creating Go itself.

Not to go too far off topic, but Go is another example. It famously ignores decades of language theory, and they wrote their own assembler, linker, etc.

Now, much of that has been undone and rewritten, as Go became more adopted, requiring playing well with the rest of the ecosystem.

(but much of it we're unfortunately stuck with, because it's part of the language)

30 years ago there was no ecosystem to play well with, and compared to now we were just banging rocks together. Back then you could be a CS polymath as one person. Well, I couldn't, but Pike could.

It was the old days of John Carmack starting every game engine with an empty directory.

I'm saying that today nobody can. Even John Carmack could not on his own write a AAA game. (I know ID had other coders, but my point stands)