I didn't know Kevin, but am friends with Tsutomu Shimomura who worked with authorities to get him arrested. Tsutomu worked with me a bit when I was at Sun trying to get a cryptographically secure subsystem into the base system specification. It was fun to listen to his side of this story.
The 80's was a really weird time for computer enthusiasts, and it was the period of time when what was then considered the "hacker" community schismed into what today we might call "white hat" vs "black hat" hackers.
As a person who considered themselves to be part of that community I was personally offended by how the story of Kevin painted everyone who thought of themselves as a "hacker" as a criminal. It made for good story telling to make these folks "pirate" or perhaps more accurately "privateer" types in their swashbuckling ways of sticking it to the man. People would say, "Exposing security holes is like solving puzzles (which is fun) and important because if I don't do it, well somebody 'bad' will." And while I'm here, why not make it hurt for them a little bit to incentivize them to fix this problem quickly!"
I didn't disagree with the importance of pointing out security problems, but the flamboyant way it was done scared the crap out of people who were both clueless and in a position to do stupid things. As a result we got the CFAA and the DMCA which are both some of the most ridiculous pieces of legislation after the so called "patriot" act.
The damage that did to curious people growing up lost the US a significant fraction of their upcoming "innovation" talent. While not diminishing the folks who leaned in to the illegality of it.
I was once tasked to work with TPM 2.0 provisioning in an embedded position. They specifically chose me and pulled me from another team because of my skills in cryptography (I wrote Monocypher). Fast forward a couple weeks, I notice that the way the provisioning was specified, it would allow us to provision a fake TPM without noticing. My team lead didn’t believe me.
Sometimes later we had an actual provisioning procedure in place, and what do you know, it worked to completion even with a fake (software) TPM and a real certificate from the manufacturer. Because, well… we just didn’t compare the relevant public keys. My team lead was still sceptical.
I had to mention the issue in a meeting with some higher-ups and the security guy to be allowed to fix the problem. I believe this goes a bit deeper than a status game. I think it’s downright magical thinking: this hope that ignoring problems (especially vague threats like security vulnerabilities), could make the problem actually disappear.