The take away for me is no matter how good you are, you still need to sell yourself.
I would argue that she missed out on nothing that matters.
I suspect that the recent articles playing up her role are because she & YC realized that there is something they're missing out on: millions of potential female founders are not starting companies because they don't have strong role models. This hurts YC in a financial sense, but even beyond that: if your mission is to increase the amount of startups and innovation in the world, then having half the world's population disqualify themselves because they don't have many good examples of it being done before is losing out.
The fact that "she failed to be recognized because she doesn't sell herself" does not translate into "she should sell herself", because the very act of doing so can undermine what makes her be so good at what she does.
And in fact, a lot of people don't care about selling themselves well, so why put so much effort and time into something a) they don't like b) they don't need?
If your comment is because you failed to recognize Jessica's talents, you should ask yourself whether that has negatively impacted her life in any way?