I think it also helped that Apple was still an underdog even after he got cancer, and very few people direct vitriol at underdogs or cancer victims.

Steve was almost universally mocked/hated by anyone that didn't use Apple products. He was also had an ornery personality that didn't mesh well with many.

I really don’t think Jobs would have created and maintained a presence through social media - I don’t think he needed or desired the attention like Musk does... But anyway, who can ever know.

It was a different time, "CEO of an unsuccessful tech company" wasn't a person you had to have an opinion on. And then once Apple became successful with iPods and iPhones, their business model was "give us money in exchange for this neat thing," which is sort generally likeable and also opt-in (technically Twitter is opt in, I guess, but all the news reporters take it very seriously for some reason, so it tends to impose even if you don't opt in).

I think it's because so many of Apple's customers idolized him. He was seen as a hero that could do no wrong, and all the poor decisions that Apple made were somehow someone else's fault. Even when I saw people complaining that Apple was making things harder for developers, Steve's name was not mentioned.

That’s mostly it. He got his share of criticism but it was almost entirely for what he did in his official capacity at Apple and he didn’t seem to crave the limelight or expect to influence works affairs anything like Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. do. The changing the world talk was mostly about making computers people wanted to use, and if you disagreed on whether they did that it wasn’t something which you needed to spend any time thinking about.