I think the "lone inventor" myth died out in the last century.
The LPF (League for Programming Freedom) saw all of this corporate nonsense coming in 1990: portfolio warfare among giants; trolling and extorting; patenting trivial things and then trolling; and to your point, the death of the heroic lone inventor without a large team of patent lawyers to earn the money.
The LPF is gone now, software patents are the domain of large corporations, and garage guy is (largely?) no more.
The LPF (League for Programming Freedom) saw all of this corporate nonsense coming in 1990: portfolio warfare among giants; trolling and extorting; patenting trivial things and then trolling; and to your point, the death of the heroic lone inventor without a large team of patent lawyers to earn the money.
The LPF is gone now, software patents are the domain of large corporations, and garage guy is (largely?) no more.