I would like to reply to your article, but there is still a sign-in wall on Medium. Maybe that's why there are no other replies yet either. I'm surprised it was even readable on my main rig, where Medium failed completely to provide text for quite some time after they launched, so I gave up a long time ago until now. I'm just a user, not a developer (of software), and I'm not in California so I usually find the most buzz about these type of companies after they are shrinking rather than growing. For me to even be aware of Medium at launch was solely a function of HN. I would have been more impressed if it would have had a user (reader) experience as satisfying (advanced?) as you used to enjoy with well-done HTML from the '90's, but time marches on, and lowered standards are the direction of movement.
Everything I ever had was a result of doing without, rather than prosperity, but sacrifice is not necessarily a factor, especially when you are not actually seeking a reward. Frustration & upset are also very common when there is not any sacrifice at all, and after numerous rewards have been received.
2) What you're struggling with is the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges [1]. Purely solving technical problems (what you call, "innovation"), will not get you anywhere if you don't pay attention to adaptive challenges. You might simply just be deluding yourself to work hard on "hard problems" that don't really matter for the course of your company and your success.
[1] I actually wrote a blog post exactly about this common misconception on Medium just this week: https://medium.com/@melvinmt/so-you-want-to-work-hard-and-ch...