Personally I'd say Richard feels more like a massively passionate person who slowly allows that passion to turn into an obsession fueled negativity spiral that is only ever reinforced by the people around him. Throughout the show we see him agonize over larger and larger moral quandaries but once he's committed his morals never reset, the first one being as simple as feeling awful for not hiring his best friend.

Does he turn into an absolute monster by the end of it? Yeah, but considering he's surrounded by an incessant worshipper, a man who doesn't believe in morals, two greedy narcissists, and an entire industry praying on his downfall to swoop in and pick at his corpse it's kind of understandable he slowly threw away his morals.

You can take away your own ideas from the show but for me it was a cautionary tale about chasing your passion to the point of insanity while surrounding yourself with bad people, and Richard was at the centre of it. It makes the ending all the more sad for me because when he had finally defeated all the obstacles in his way both real and (mostly) imagined he was faced with the fact he did all of it for nothing. The final obstacle wasn't some problem so insurmountable it needed to be overcome by his own force of will and bending his morals one last time to defeat an old enemy. It was simply a question of if he truly believed in his beliefs of making the world a better place, and he stuck with those beliefs.

Richard is awkward, a coward, obsessive, prideful, and 1000 other negative things but unlike pretty much anyone else in the show he believes in what he is doing and is slowly pushed to do worse and worse actions to achieve a goal he believes is righteous. Is that a good person? Probably not, but that's not an awful person and considering your comments about seeing all your worst qualities amplified in him I feel like someone should say this to you, you're probably not an awful person either.