This meme isn't completely wrong, but it's not completely right either. Before you listen to anything I have to say about it I'd refer you to the guy who co-designed a Lisp variant and the site we're having this conversation on, who is also probably the most successful tech investor in history (who presumably knows a thing or two about what's important if your goal is building successful technology businesses) [0]:

"Hackers like to work for people with high standards. But it's not enough just to be exacting. You have to insist on the right things. Which usually means that you have to be a hacker yourself. I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up."

I've only worked for one FAANG, but it was for like 7-8 years out of a 20+ year career, and it was mostly on stuff where even small mistakes cost a lot of money so I'll counter your anecdote with one of my own: at the beginning of the century the software business was really weak on demographic diversity (a problem we still have and still needs to be addressed) but it was unparalleled in neurodiversity. In particular there's a longitudinal component to my observation. I'm not here to diagnose anyone via the Internet, but it's pretty clear that George (like a lot of us) is pretty friggin "different".

During the period of time (say 1995-2015 +/- 3 years) when most of the current empires of tech were built, staggeringly successful managers in both open-source (e.g. Linus) and industry (e.g. Sheryl) created a lot of space for aspy nerds who "spouted off" about tech stuff in blunt "this is stupid" kinds of ways, and all kinds of other stuff that's now called "being toxic" rather than "being a weird nerd". It was only during that latter half of this time (and really the end of it) that software became a sufficiently high-status occupation to draw in a bunch of people who decided that it was a good idea to outmaneuver those folks on the org chart and re-brand an entire industry of people from "probably on the spectrum at least a bit" to "toxic asshole".

I don't know if packing Linus off to charm school because he was simply too important to write off was a better or worse move than just letting him be Linus on a mailing list he founded, I kinda liked the original Linus. But even if we decided that old-school hacker aspiness couldn't get a blank check anymore (on the Internet we fucking built), it's just a strictly better idea to strike some sort of compromise with the aspy nerds than to redefine the vibe that had prevailed for decades as basically up there with racism, misogyny, and homophobia (you might notice that aspy tech assholes are on average some of the least racist, misogynistic, and homophobic people in any industry: they on average accept anyone who kicks ass at code or is trying hard and are short with anyone who is dismissive of code, irrespective of demo).

I wrote the `im2col` and dilated convolution kernels on NVIDIA and Intel that went into Caffe2 originally, and AFAIK that stuff migrated over to like ATen or whatever (though I imagine someone has rewritten it since), so I don't exactly love the "spout off technical terms all day log" characterization, but mostly I'll admonish you that calling leadership and communication skills "infinitely" more important than technical expertise is dangerously close to "arrogance and ignorance", and that overlooking that someone has been in the public eye on e.g. Twitter since they were 16 doesn't seem like a particularly serious effort to "relate".

In a way rather reminiscent of early Linus, George has organized a few thousand iconoclastic accelerated computing pros and/or people aspiring to become one into a small but surprisingly credible threat to the current round of Bond Villain monopolists. Maybe we cut him some slack on being a bit of an edgelord on his own Twitter account, his own Twitch stream, his own GitHub Issues page, and to set the culture at his own startup?

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html