While antirez is a great programmer, I think his accomplishments are far from that of Dean or Carmack. There are many notable folks in his playing field.
Same with redis. Is it the best DB ever? Probably not. But it is definitely used quite a bit in the industry and a lot of people get acquainted with nosql databases and k/v stores through redis.
Engineering accomplishments without proper marketing, education and adoption are quite useless, for better or for worse