Eh, is it? Not sure if I consider him an authority on anything anymore.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/z2y8i0/fro...
>This is the interview. Build this feature. You don't get source access. Link the GitHub and license it MIT.
is akin to "Build this for free, license it MIT so I can use it without any issues, and oh, btw, I dont have authority to hire you, teehee."
He was just clicking around compulsively, jumping between stuff randomly without even reading it, while not understanding what he was looking at. I have no idea how he's successful in tech, judging from what I saw there.
I think judging only from what you saw there is the issue. If you look somewhere like Wikipedia [0], you'll see he was the first person to jailbreak the iPhone, the first person to achieve hypervisor access to the PS3's CPU, he took first place in several notable CTFs (at least one time as a one-person team), he worked on Google's Project Zero team (and created a debugger called QIRA while he was there), creating comma.ai, and the list goes on.
The right approach when you're new is to quietly pick a simple problem away from the core services where you can learn the processes and polices needed to get something into Production. More so when you're in a company that is undergoing a brain drain.
Then you can progressively move to solving more demanding and critical issues.
Before you run you learn to walk.
"Rocking the boat" is more likely than not to make things worse.