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He worked on some of those things in 1666 but did not publish anything. That is kind of the point of the article. Newton had a lot of reluctance around publication; he did not follow modern norms.

I wonder how much of those things he actually figured out in his 20s and just did not publish, versus thinking about them without drawing many conclusions or making significant progress until he actually published 20 years later?

We have his notebook from his 20s. So you can read it yourself and know what he was thinking then and compare it with what he published much later.

https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/03/annus-tran...

1666 was the year Newton spent an extended period at home when an outbreak of the plague forced Cambridge to close. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis

I like to imagine that someone somewhere is currently immersed in their own annus mirabilis and the fruits of those discoveries will be a silver lining to this terrible pandemic.

Interesting, the article seems to suggest that he did not have much of an impact until he published a couple decades later.