My project is "general", "flexible", and what I consider "done right" (time<->quality issues aside), and definitely requires a specific mindset. As you suggest, I often find myself, internally, blaming others for not being able to "see" it or caring enough to understand it, but I can make it dance beautifully when something new/strange needs to be incorporated, often "saving the day".
I know that if I left now, it would swiftly collapse, bringing the whole team to a halt. Management has also realized this, resulting in some nice shiny golden handcuffs.
The new developer we hired (since I did become The bottleneck) isn't the greatest (his performance reviews agree), and is slowly breaking things, but I'm only half stopping him because I'm trying to assume my rigidity in the "correctness" must be flawed, and I don't want to damage the relationship any more than it has been.
Now I'm in the progress of scaling this 10x, and I don't want to be a 10x bottleneck.
The only thing that holds back m imposter syndrome, and makes me think it's my, as you say, qualities, is that, after nearly 3 years, the churn from many of the other teams are finally converging towards the one implementation that I've had working, stably, in that same time span, for all of the same reasons that I implemented it the way I did.
tldr;
> It's easy to interpret this as being about your qualities instead of your failings
This is probably me. So, what's the solution? Re-think the whole concept to come up with a different implementation? Simplify?