I agree. This sort of thing...

Maybe they lived in a neighborhood incompatible to themselves, especially pre-social media. Think of 'nerds' stranded in classes without peers.

can be viewed as a case of "wrong level of abstraction" as I alluded to here.

I think what we have here is two possible sources of error, diametrically opposed to each other. Some people refuse to take responsibility for their failures, and it is at them that "you are the only common denominator ..." is aimed. Other people blame themselves even when they shouldn't, as you say. Let us not let one sort of error blind us to the existence of the other.

When it comes to constructing or selecting rationality quotes, we should keep in mind that what we're often doing is attempting to point out and correct some bias, which means that the relevance of the quote is obviously constrained by whether we have that bias at all, or perhaps have the opposite bias instead.