I can't speak for anyone else.. I'm an older developer, and a bit of a "rock star" so to speak. I know I'm at the pay ceiling, and peaked out into upper mgt a couple years ago, and never again. I'll accept where the pay is, and simply work where the best fit is. I've never been one to show up at a certain time every day (usually 9-ish).. but after lunch, I tend to get a lot more done than my contemporaries.
I try to at least be aware of what's going on around me. It's not always easy as there's a lot of new stuff every day, and when you finally get around to it, things change.
Most recently, I've been dabbling in NodeJS, as it's a good fit for one-off import scripts and backend systems. That allowed my to have a grunt script setup for the client parts of a new .Net project, where the backend is ASP.Net MVC ... I've seen the bundles out of the box in mvc, and feel that it's excessively painful.
By the same note, I can usually make a good judgement call as to when to plug my nose, and just make the patch work. Experience counts for a lot. And at the higher end the pay doesn't generally match your productivity... I'm a cog, but good enough at what I do that people tend to overlook my quirks regarding daily schedules.
For every prodigy I've seen (about 3 others in my career), I've seen a several dozen that were competent, not great, but get the job done, and several more dozen idiots who really should have a different career, and enough people that could be good, but can't break out of the same patterns they've used for over a decade to be more effective that I don't like thinking about it.
There are plenty of stereotypes, and plenty of exceptions. It's funny that SO is mentioned as the source in the article, as most of my best answers happen to come from me revisiting and updating older answers/questions with newer material. Beyond that it's pretty narrow as a focus, just tend to gear towards my interests.