I would say if there was any lull in Jobs' popularity it would have been between when he was fired in '85 to the early '90s, by '96 Pixar had released Toy Story

I would say if there was any lull in Jobs' popularity it would have been between when he was fired in '85 to the early '90s, by '96 Pixar had released Toy Story and Jobs had been Acqui-hired back by Apple. OS X, iPod, and iPhone are far from his first successes. Through this time he worked with thousands of people and was an asshole the whole time, so when people saw his trajectory in the 90s after his fall in the 80s they were even more convinced that Scully was wrong and Jobs had been right all along. One of the things they mention in the article is the "bar raiser" concept and I've seen that concept used politically at Amazon offshoots. They don't mention in the article the morale-crushing public blame games in the name of "accountability" that Bezos acolytes can't resist doing, that's well documented in many other Amazon introspectives. Same shit, different decade.