I agree with your caution, I disagree largely with your reasons/the dangers you identify. I've avoided California, so maybe that has an impact, but I almost never have seen ego as a problem. I'm one of the only ones who will do impractical things sometimes (but just as often my crazy ideas are radically simpler).
My gut feel is that romantics have it the hardest. They are way more in touch with the potential & powers of it all, the overwhelming awesomeness that is everywhere, & how un-tapped, un-actualized the world-actual about them is. I don't have particular links, alas, but I think of MrDoob, author of the much loved Three.js library which has the lion's share of 3D on the web. He seems clearly to be engaged, to be interested, but he also has talked to himself not being great employee-material, suffering problems of motivation.
The really romantics have problems of alignment. There are few situations in the world where the passion is allowed to flow. There are few working environments that support the chaotic workflow & passion-driven-development. Agile: we all practice agile. What is agile but a way to insure consistent steady endless sprints, each slowly optimizing productivity? What an evil anethema, a plague upon those of us who work by our muses. The corporation, the industry, wants worker bees. And for many years that's probably a good way to function, probably a valuable personal development, of fitting in, declaring what you are working on, learning how to tackle problems. But in the long game, I think this mode of software development is a joke, is consistently low-ambition, squanders the immense potential we have. And I don't think you need long deep experience & talent to be squandered.