Roots of Evil is good Corpse, you need to relisten to that.
in general I don't see that being limited in what you can do is necessarily a bad thing, if you're exceptionally good at that one thing that you do - as Big L was.
Rather that Lord Finesse had already done and done a million times better and Big L just ran into the ground. There's only so much worth in "Peanut Butter Ass Rappers; Damn Skippy" type bars, and people have to admit that to themselves. Vitriol aside Big L was good at a thing, but it was a gimmick, there was little else he could do, and then eventually when he died those limitations weren't recognized as a "Well, its a shame he didn't get to evolve into a better rapper/artist" it became "SLEPT ON". Nobody's sleeping on someone who can demonstrate all his best qualities in one verse, let alone one track.
(I actually forgot Diamond D who had easily one of the best albums of his era let alone of his crew so kudos to rubber to correcting me there)
I'm not interested in punching down, I'm more struggling with the eternal saga of the underground punching up at an opponent who isn't necessarily fighting them all the time; like some underachieving sibling resenting the other for following commonplace expectations. And its very rarely the artists themselves who hold onto those chips on their shoulder until they become older and get upset with things that are so divorced everything they worked towards (a la the Pete Rock / Lil Yachty fracas). Also the division between commercial and underground is usually more perceived from down the hill than up... Like, Alchemist albums had everyone in the mainstream, 50 Cent rapped over Exile and Disco D. Hell a dude in the DITC collective made "Woah!" which was a commercial banger for a guy on a label most often associated with undermining "The true Spirit of Hip-Hop" and all that. I wish I had better allegories than production-based examples in my head at the moment but...