E.g. tell me how many times you've read an article about Jony Ive versus about an important software engineer at Apple.
Maybe no articles written about them but books or chapters ([0], [1]) written by them.
In the spotlight? You betcha, i think watching talks by Brian Cantrill is highly entertaining. Rich Rickeys' talks are highly regarded on HN (making a mental note to watch them). Carmack talking at Quakecon for hours about many different things.
(edit) formatting and links
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Masterminds-Programming-Conversations...
Chris Lattner (inventor of LLVM and Swift) was pretty prominent when he was at Apple. He got stage time during at least one keynote and was well known in the macOS/iOS community. Not to mention that their engineering leads in general get to present their work every year to the devs who will be using it during the WWDC sessions.
But Carmack is from a generation where developers were often still working on something on their own.
I do see a shift to a model where developers are viewed more as a commodity and less as artists. In a "just throw more developers at the problem" kind of way.
It's been around long enough that seminar works on management calling the practice out are disregarded by some as outdated just by age