I realize you asked about people in general and not Howell himself, but he said[1] almost exactly that about his product:

Well, no I didn't [write something worthy of Google]. I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested. It’s shit frankly.

But he goes on:

On the other hand, my software was insanely successful. Why is that? Well the answer is not in the realm of computer science. I have always had a user-experience focus to my software. Homebrew cares about the user. When things go wrong with Homebrew it tries as hard as it can to tell you why, it searches GitHub for similar issues and points you to them. It cares about you.

1. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... (Quora link, sorry)