Some of it is fair. The author does seem a bit egotistical at times. They begin from a premise that "Everyone else is incompetent and I am the savior".
There is a high likelihood that many other people in the org were lightyears ahead of the author. It's even more likely that an engineer or manager in their group was "Banking" the inefficiencies to use during a cost-cutting period - and the author ruined that chance... which will inevitably cause massive suffering and possibly poor performance reviews when there is nothing to trim.
At the end of the day, your curiosity and talent is used to make money for someone.
Fetishizing work productivity and ability ignores the fact that most company owners are managerial types that will harness your output for monetary value. You could easily end up wasting your life by becoming some niche field leader in the systems you work on, but never enjoying the rewards of your talent.
Hackernews in particular likes the idea of a life spent entirely behind a laptop, but there is a larger world out there, and the winners are enjoying it while we chase little lifehacks to eke out 20 extra minutes of productivity in a 10 hour day.
I'm as guilty of this productivity fetishization as anyone here, but am just reaching a point in life where I'm starting to notice the walls of the maze.
My cousin tried to become a twitch streamer. He is an incredible gamer and did some competitive gaming in shooter tournaments back in the day. He's also very funny and charismatic.
He became interested in hacking minecraft pushed some of the boundaries of what you could do in the modding/hacking scene.
Despite his efforts, things never really took off and ended up heading off to college like the rest of us.
I have never used snowflake so I'm not sure how this works.