I would personally disagree.
My main knowledge of Marvel, like the only period I've read tons of comics and tpbs from is the mid-1980s through to about 2000, so just before Ultimate stuff. This because I didn't buy Marvel stuff really but had a friend who bought ALL OF IT basically lol. He had a huuuuuuuuge bedroom (like, I thought mine was big - his was probably 4x the size - you could rent it as a studio flat nowadays and it wouldn't even be a small one) and there were just neat and orderly piles of Marvel comics and tpbs everywhere.
And if you asked me in that period, how do you feel about Reed Richards, I'd have told you "The man is a smug jerk".
Can I remember exactly why? No. But that emotional impression of him is very solid and I definitely read a lot of FF comics or crossovers involving the FF. So my strong belief is that he's been a jerk since sometime in the 1980s or 1990s. I know this was also the feeling of other friends who'd read the same comics.