I wouldn't say Vitalik Buterin is anywhere near as legendary as the names you dropped, but he's the closest to what you described, in terms of being as close as possible to the underlying tech rather than just being associated with the hype train (and scam train) riding on top of it.

Vitalik's original Ethereum whitepaper, updated to be relevant in 2022 - https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/

Vitalik's blog - https://vitalik.ca/