That might be, but by the late 90s my first few stabs at Linux were using Red Hat because it was far enough along that books were published and available at my local book store (I did also try Yellow Dog, a Red Hat variant, when repurposing an old PowerPC). By the early 2000s I saw box sets in Best Buy. In my industry, most of the large companies moved from IRIX to Red Hat and have been using them since. Most of the others moved to a different free distro, then to CentOS.
Sure, and it seems like he's happy to take credit for that era, but most of Red Hats value came from the time after Young left, and I don't really think it's modesty for him to not take credit for that