This could be me - maybe except the successful stock grants :)
Some of things I said and did when I was writing PHP shitcode at 24 make me want to crawl inside my couch. I'd like to think I've mellowed out a lot, but I think everyone is susceptible to falling into this trap, especially when they're highly compensated and well respected.
It's not just you. Most, if not all, of what humanity knows is wrong. It's easy to trick ourselves into thinking our constructs reflect reality: we sit at the pinnacle of human understandanding looking forward and our constructs are correct enough that things mostly work.
I've recently taken to adopting an "antiquity mindset." Instead of imagining a piece of information as the pinnacle of knowledge in our current context, I remind myself that in 10 (or 100, or 1000) years, folks are going to look back at these ideas with a red pen marking everything we were mistaken about.
Stay humble in what you "know" - most of what humanity will discover is in the future.
My first boss was your classic unix-beard, I hear his echo in some of the things I say. Nobody liked him either, but it's easier to get away with it at a 5 engineer company where you're the only one who dares touch the 10 year old C codebase.
Some of things I said and did when I was writing PHP shitcode at 24 make me want to crawl inside my couch. I'd like to think I've mellowed out a lot, but I think everyone is susceptible to falling into this trap, especially when they're highly compensated and well respected.