I think the "lone inventor" myth died out in the last century. The LPF (League for Programming Freedom) saw all of this corporate nonsense coming in 1990: port

I think the "lone inventor" myth died out in the last century. The LPF (League for Programming Freedom) saw all of this corporate nonsense coming in 1990: portfolio warfare among giants; trolling and extorting; patenting trivial things and then trolling; and to your point, the death of the heroic lone inventor without a large team of patent lawyers to earn the money. The LPF is gone now, software patents are the domain of large corporations, and garage guy is (largely?) no more.