There's a difference between coding skillz and vision. Code can be reviewed and improved by committee at any stage. Vision is something you either have or you haven't.

Take hashcash for example - A great coder could invent hashcash and turn it into a failed email anti spam tool. However, Satoshi could use his vision to use it as a bedrock in a project that goes on to have a $6.5 billion market cap that we are still talking about 6 years later.

But I agree, cult of personality is stupid, But you still have to assign credit where credit is due.