The author didn't become rich. He made $10K, but spent several months trying to, so in effect his salary certainly wasn't more than if he worked as an employee for a FAANG company.

I'm grateful for the story for exactly the reason you mention: it's a datapoint from someone struggling, not from someone who made it. And like you say, we need those datapoints just as much as the survivor stories.

That’s not true at all. Stories like “How I f’ed up this” and “How my business failed” are popping up all the time. Those are also discussed very much, because there is lots to learn from it.

If at all, HN is much better at showcasing failures than the rest of the interwebs.

"Prior to launching vim.so I was heads down for about 4 months working on an online interactive Python course called Deliberate. [...] I was working on Deliberate in the early mornings before my day job for 4 months and I had made $0."

[https://www.slip.so/blog/how-I-made-10k-teaching-vim]

Those people aren't writing blog posts about it!

even in this specific post, the author mentions "the struggles of launching many failed projects before the vim.so course"

$10k is rich now?

I'm begging you to stop commenting this on every single success story

it's called survivorship bias