While I can agree there are 'real' rockstar developers that act like the original article mentions, I don't think whether Rick was or wasn't one of them is what matters here. What matters most here is how management dealt with him and their lack of responsibility for Rick's work for the last two years(!) and the end as their result.
Other industries seem to get this better than ours. I've worked in quite a few places that assign too many projects or tasks to key developers and then reprimand them for lack of quality or quantity, which ever you will inevitably buckle under first and it's never the manager's fault for assigning too many tickets or not prioritising their tasks correctly (we're not mind readers) but yet it's always the developers fault for the perceived lack of skill or lack of effort. Don't get me started on the arbitrarily shifting release dates that correlate with buggy releases that we developers get angry emails about. Maybe I've worked at badly managed busineses, or hey, maybe I'm just a bad developer, but this seems like the normal to me.
But if you're managing someone and they fuck up, it's also your responsibility because you were meant to be managing them. That was your job. Even if Rick was told to stop working, take a break, and he didn't it's still not up to him, it's up to the manager to decide what's best for Rick and best for the project.