I'd say Fabrice Bellard is more a "mythical mainstay". It's hard to go a week without someone posting about him and his projects if you keep an eye out for it. Right now 3 of the stories on the front page (including this one) have mentions of him which is definitely more than average but even when this dips down you'll still see the constant trickle.

A large part of it is obviously that his projects really are good and plentiful but I think another sizeable part is due to something the article points out: he doesn't do any self promotion. He doesn't write blogposts, he doesn't do interviews, he doesn't have any hot takes on Twitter, he doesn't comment on HN... he just writes great code. It's both admirable/enviable as well as a bit more mysterious or "out of reach" than a lot of the other "legendary programmers" e.g. Justine who write equally amazing things but are a bit more tangible here. Not that one way is right or wrong it just helps his name get pretty consistently randomly brought up by HNers.