1. Do you have stats? In absolute terms, a whole lot of people hiring programmers have programmed themselves. How do you know the other people hiring programmers are "the vast majority"? (I sincerely wonder about it. I cited two numbers by two bloggers, one says it's 80% of the cases, the other says 90%. I have no idea, but I intuitively feel it's less than 50%. Are there real stats?)
2. I mentioned Ron Garret because I replied to an article mentioning him and Google as a proof of something that this example actually disproves, not because I thought it's a good example to generalize from.
3. I agree, which is why I said that people overvalue early option grants (hoping for the value to rise tenfold which it probably won't); I added to that an explanation why late option grants past the point where value can possibly rise tenfold are undervalued (because the money you make is the difference in prices, which rises with the absolute value of the stock price even if the growth rate goes down.)
I said near the end that I'm not sure I'm reading the original article as intended so you could say I misrepresent it; what I am pretty sure of is that a whole lot of people read it very closely to the way I'm reading it in my reply, and I'm writing for those people.
Your "biggest takeaway" is exactly what I'd like the takeaway to be; all I'm saying is that SaaS/freelancing career is not the only path to succeed in "programming", and that there are other paths you might want to take and you'd behave differently if you took them.