The whitepaper took years to write. Imagine working on something that very few people had interest in for that long.
Probably the most underrated thing about Satoshi was the passion and grit to work ...
The obscurity was inherited too — b-money, hashcash, and bit gold each dangled for years with almost no audience, and Satoshi's real feat was finishing what they left unfinished. The grittier part came after the whitepaper: two years of maintaining a network worth nothing, then walking away exactly when it could have become a career.