I think its the curse of doing development professionally - except the rare case where open source monetization has worked well enough to support a long career,

I think its the curse of doing development professionally - except the rare case where open source monetization has worked well enough to support a long career, closed source software is designed to be disposable. You build something fast because marketing or sales wanted it, not because it was a good idea or anybody found it useful. Most people probably hated your feature. But, OFC, giving it away for free is nearly impossible to actually make money off of. Like the taxi driver, probably nobody will remember you unless you said something particularly impactful to someone. Someone working as a pro-bono ambulance driver is more likely to receive accolades, but that's still difficult.