Yes and he was not amused, to put it mildly, just have a look at some of his tweets: https://mobile.twitter.com/tjholowaychuk/status/885580704037...
Sorry if my ranting comes off as immature, you're probably not wrong haha but I'm perfectly happy to discuss about how ridiculous Silicon Valley is, founders aren't special, they're not visionaries, just con artists.
I'm not saying life is supposed to be fair, startups are designed to keep people like me from competing, it's just a huge joke to me.
Seems like you're arguing that VC are funding something worthless or not worth much... but that you should be getting paid for building the same product?
I'm a nobody in this field but know enough about you to get that you're extremely productive and talented. Why not go this route:
Plenty of so called "lifestyle" businesses that make plenty of money. Of course it's not that easy, but find a niche and build a great product. Pure tech plays like cloud deployment infrastructure seems to be operating at such a hyper-competitive level, that there's no way to avoid either big VC money, or Google/Amazon themselves.
Hell there's even a timeseries startup, been around for ~5 years, they had no clue how to write databases, got paid for 3 years to finally realize columnar makes sense for analytics... no offence to them but you see this all the time, re-loaders with some vague trivial "vision", bunch of clueless VCs and buzzwords, and boom they have millions. It's such a sad way to compete, at least have the skills first. It's like no one wants to actually earn things these days.
Also, picking an original idea is skill.
If the idea is not original or unusually compelling, then marketing is even more important.
There's more to business than code. Happy to offer some tips on competitive strategy and moat building if you'd like, altho I'm just an hobbyist investor with an econ degree from a former life.