People don't like it, because it's used to justify fatalistic write offs of people. I agree it's wrong to do that because people are often wrong in writing off people, especially the aggressively independent :)
Nature definitely hardwires in some baseline chemistry, but those first couple of years have a huge impact on how a child will deal with that chemistry.
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93YWtpbmd1cC5saW...
For instance, you could expect a brilliant academic to be socially conformist, while academically aggressive and independent. Some sort of criminal or outlaw would be aggressively independent when it comes to following the laws of society, and maybe conformist when it comes to following the criminal discipline (this is when you have mobs and gangs --- outlaws find each other and form groups, too).
And it is a combination of these different styles that make up the overall personality profile.
This contains a strong assumption of nature over nurture. I push back on that. (A point of evidence being salivary cortisol correlations with high-stress childhoods and even prenatal environments.)
Independent-minded cultures produce more independent thinkers. A culture that censors raises children by rewarding convention-seeking behaviour and sharply punishing non-conformance.
(Counterpoint: Did the children of circa 1920s academics become academics at a greater frequency than those of postwar academics? Anecdotally, I think so. A lot of them, as PG hypothesises, became founders. That suggests an innate quality that seeks its environment.)
This might also be content-dependent. When I was young, I oscillated between tattletelling and rampant rulebreaking, with a memorable drive to stand out from my peer group. Notably, an inflection point, to my memory and, surprisingly, to my discovery a few years ago after reading childhood notes, was when my family immigrated to America. To-day, I’m passively conformist with the law, but moderately independent when it comes to personal social, political and broader commercial activities, enjoying standing out even if it means being quirky or disliked. I don’t imagine I’d have been the same in Switzerland or in India.