Like someone saying they're an alpha male... imo most devs, junior or not would love to tackle problems without the oversight of a lead. Maybe his code reviews are so heavy handed that devs would rather get his okay before rather than getting scorched after.

To second that, the best programmers I know are quite upfront about how much they don't know.

This can have the paradoxical effect of people relying on them less in situations where they should, because they think the 10x doesn't know anything, and instead they turn to the braggart 1/10x programmer who claims he knows everything. (Not meaning the OP on this; I just know a guy IRL who is exactly this.)

Mistaking confidence for competence.

(It seems to me, though, that OP is both competent and reasonably confident, a good combination.)

I wonder if this is based on a statistical summary over your experience. What does your confusion matrix [1] look like?

Also: (1) It is easy to say "from my experience" without sampling from it representatively. (2) It can be difficult, in general, to gather life experience that is balanced across all four elements of the confusion matrix. (This is a general statement that includes survivorship bias.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix