I read the Feynman books as a young person (middle school?) and I came away with a different and very positive impression. What inspired me about him was his insatiable curiosity and how that was expressed. As a kid, the silly stories are funny, and they have a certain appeal just for that, but they are stories in which the protagonist is a curious, brilliant, child-like scientist, which is something to aspire to. That didn't lead to any later attempt to model my own behavior on him as a physics student, and I can't think of examples of people that I saw that had done that.