rare occasion where he gained a legendary status based purely on his work, I dont think I ever saw even a written interview with the guy

Bellard it the most genius programmer to ever exist, and the least known compared to other pseudo stars.

His consistency and craftsmanship is amazing.

Being an engineer and coding at this stage/level is just remarkable- sadly this trade craft is missing in most (big?) companies as you get promoted away into oblivion.

There is! ACM grants several awards for scientists and more.

One such award is the Turing Award [1], given "for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science."

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

If there were some form of "developed contributions to computing" award, his name is definitely up there. I think there could be a need for such an award - for people who reliably have created the foundations of modern computing. Otherwise it's almost always things from an academic context, which can be a little too abstract.

Between ffmpeg and qemu, I always think of https://xkcd.com/2347/ when I see Fabrice's work. Especially since ffmpeg provides the backbone of almost all video streaming systems today.