I mean at that point you might as well talk about the people building microchips and power plants. You can always abstract down, but you're ignoring the fact that nginx is ~250k very important LOC with huge impact on the world. That is non-trivial in its own right.
Exactly, you might as well. It compares precisely to the original hyperbole that two people are somehow the linchpin to the entire internet.
For example, how much of that code is the mail server component and how much is the http component? How much does http/1, or http/2 or http/3 take up? How much of that is necessary to keep the internet actually running?
I'm not suggesting it's trivial but the original perspective was highly overblown. To think of it another way, if these two men died tomorrow, how much of an impact would it actually have? Some, to be sure, but the internet wouldn't even notice.
