Terry definitely was an old-school hacker that didn't care about whether or not his products saw mass adoption, he did it because it was what he wanted to do most. There is a lot of humor in TempleOS and Terry in his more reasonable moments was actually a very nice and caring person. I spent some time trying to convince HN to look past his troubles but alas it did not come to pass.
You needed to watch a lot of his videos and read enough of his daily posts he used to make on his site to understand it, but everything he said was actually perfectly consistent within his own world view.