This is what it boils down to. The combination of competent and contrarian often becomes extremely toxic for the workplace.

This is 100% true in basically any case of bigger than startup orgs - you don't desperately need that superstar 10x or 100x coder if he is pain to work with, creates code full of abstractions that are then hard to maintain for rest of the team or even worse, like potential security problem (looking into OP for 2 mins I already know he is rather hardcore christian, maybe a bit gun nut, antivaxxer/anti-mask, has long history of anxiety and other health issues). All sums up into 'probably difficult to work with'.

This would be a problem for me when hiring too (to be frank - hard pass due to above, and no amount of git code beauty would change that).

Collaboration, communication, team work are much more important long term in bigger teams. Willingness to help team/project even though sometimes bureaucracy might be Kafka-esque. Yes we are all cogs in big machine, so what? It takes 2 seconds to realize that for each of us. We still do the work, its work for christ sake, we pay the bills, vacations and go back to our families just like everybody else.

I never said that companies weren't right to not hire me.

I personally think I'm just not a good for anywhere.