I remember LZEXE from those olden days. When I discovered the author of FFmpeg and QEMU also created LZEXE, I was so impressed. I've been using his software for my entire computing career.

It's similar to the respect I have for the work of Anders Hejlsberg, who created Turbo Pascal, with which I learned to program; and also C# and TypeScript.

Self-decompressing executables felt like magic to me at the time. Fantastic work, overall.

Reading about APE similarly sparkled me - the amount of ingenuity and sheer amazingness (if not perhaps a touch of depravity) that goes into these kinds of endeavors is awe inspiring.