The fact that so many people use FFmpeg and QEMU suggest that he is quite good at documenting, collaborating, and at least making his code remarkably clean and easy to follow. This already puts him way ahead of the average silicon valley senior software engineer that I've worked with. However, he does value independence so I don't think he would have been happy working at a faang-type company for long.

Not really. https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2022/12/ffhistory-fabrice-bella...

>Fabrice won International Obfuscated C Code Contest three times and you need a certain mindset to create code like that—which creeps into your other work. So despite his implementation of FFmpeg was fast-working, it was not very nice to debug or refactor, especially if you’re not Fabrice