Also a jazz musician and I find that it depends on what time frame you're talking about. I like him a lot up to the very early 60s, and then he loses me around this point. I prefer the direction other hard bop players took at this time. Coltrane benefited greatly imo from Tyner's rock solid comping and Jones' aggressive drum work. His sax soloing got a bit too interested in dense excess, often fairly inscrutable even before he drifted into free jazz. Opinions absolutely vary on this point though. I think it still sounds good even if it's not what I reach for.

>an entire school of derivative jazz players had long since developed upon and retroactively made his innovations feel far more common

The worst of this to me is at straightahead jazz jams when sax players run out of ideas or lose the form and then just start honking lol