That's roughly how I broke in to technical work, modulo the patents. 25 years later I actually do feel at home in particular domains. But I was a young college dropout in the early 90s, and while I never outright misrepresented my experience, I did tell myself that nobody else had any idea how that stuff worked either. (Which I tend to believe more now than I did then, but for different reasons...)

As programming and systems engineering slowly formalizes, it seems to me that's getting harder to do. I see fewer self-taught folks in their early-mid 20s these days at least, although I could be observing my personal bias from aging. Anyone else have an idea?

You’re describing a person who has a huge amount of expertise in sales.

But a person like that can very lucratively sell actual products that already exist, so why would they want to sell this mysterious X?

Because the person is actually a business that:

a) employs enough scientists who know what they're doing and lawyers who know what they're doing to file relevant and defensible patents; and

b) has enough entrenched relationships that they can pay for a sales force what knows what they're doing; but

c) doesn't employ enough engineers who know what they're doing to develop actual competitive products around those patentable ideas.

but products that actually exist are X-1 not X

This is exactly what IBM and Oracle etc have been doing for years.