Roast my EB-1A profile: tech lead at Fortune 500 clients, but all my "wow" work is proprietary

Looking for unsentimental feedback. I've read enough approval/RFE/denial threads here to know my self-assessment is biased, so please be blunt.

Quick background (kept generic on purpose)

• ~12 YOE, currently a Staff full-stack engineer
• MS in CS from a US R1 university, BS in CS from overseas
• Employed by a small US consulting firm; deployed as a senior IC at multiple Fortune 500 clients across retail, fintech, food/beverage, and mobility over the past several years
• Specialization: distributed transaction systems, federated GraphQL gateways, payment orchestration, e-commerce platform infra
• Research project at a European university on container/networking infrastructure
• AWS Solutions Architect Associate (whatever that's worth here, which I assume is "not much")

Where I think I stand on the 10 criteria

Criteria I probably meet today:

• Leading/critical role at a distinguished organization — Staff/lead engineer on payment + checkout systems at multiple top-30 Fortune 500 brands; architected platforms touching tens of millions of end users; ICs on the team tend to come from FAANG. I think the case is real, but I'm a vendor/contractor at the F500s, not a direct employee. That's the wrinkle.
• High remuneration — Comp is in top decile for my role and metro per BLS bands. Documentable.

Criteria I'm actively building (12–24 mo plan):

• Original contributions of major significance — Designing/shipping an open-source TS/Node package in the GraphQL federation tooling space. Goal is real adoption, not vanity stars.
• Scholarly articles — Drafting papers that abstract proprietary patterns (payment orchestration, federation at scale) into generalizable contributions; targeting one trade publication and one peer-reviewed venue.
• Professional memberships — Joining IEEE + ACM, eventually pushing for senior-member tier where qualifying.
• Judging the work of others — Lining up conference/journal peer review roles once memberships are in place.

Criteria I'm weak/zero on:

• Awards — Nothing.
• Press about me — Products I've built have been covered in tier-1 outlets (think TechCrunch-tier, Forbes, AWS case studies, mainstream tech press), but I'm not named in any of it. My read is this is essentially worthless for EB-1A. Tell me if I'm wrong.
• Exhibitions / commercial perf. arts — N/A obviously.

The structural constraint shaping all of this

Basically everything I've built day-to-day is locked behind enterprise proprietary walls. I can't publish architecture diagrams from client systems. So the strategy is forced into: (1) generalize patterns into papers, (2) build OSS I fully own, (3) earn external recognition that doesn't depend on any one employer signing off. PhD is on hold for cost reasons.

Questions for the sub:

1. Is "18–24 months of focused execution to fileable" realistic from this starting point, or am I lying to myself?
2. How much does the vendor-at-F500 vs. direct-employee distinction actually matter for the leading/critical-role prong? Attorneys I've talked to are genuinely split on this. Would love stories from anyone who threaded that needle.
3. The press-covered-the-product-not-me gap — is that as fatal as I think, or have people successfully argued around it (e.g., by getting cited as a contributor in follow-up coverage, conference talks, podcasts)?
4. For the open-source criterion — what's the realistic adoption bar (stars / weekly downloads / named corporate users / dependent packages) before USCIS adjudicators treat it as serious "major significance" evidence rather than a hobby project?
5. Anyone here go EB-1A successfully without a PhD, coming from a staff-engineer-at-distinguished-orgs background? What was the keystone evidence — was it OSS adoption, papers, talks, or something else entirely?

Not looking for hopium. If the honest answer is "you're 3+ years out, stop touching the stove," I'd rather absorb that now than after burning attorney retainer hours.

Thanks in advance.