There is a clear change in attitude betwen kid Olruggio and adult Olruggio.
I have seen some people say that this change was due to the growing distance between him and Qifrey throughout the years. And while I do agree that it was a factor I don't think it was the main cause.
As we know, Olruggio was a child genius, so much so that even back in Ghodrey he was taken on field work despite having no master.
Another thing about Olruggio is that because of this, he developed people pleaser attitudes, a perfectionist streak on his work and a tendency to put all of the responsibility on himself (after all if I'm so good, why couldn't I save everyone?).
Taking into account that he made the glowstone path when he was still a student, I think it's safe to assume he started taking comissions as a teen, and the workload just kept getting bigger and bigger with time. And poor Olruggio, bless his heart, didn't put boundaries to all the comissions that kept comming, as he saw it his responsibility to keep creating contraptions that could help people and out of a sense of duty (I'm suppossed to be keeping up with everything, I was the star of Ghodrey) and kept working to the point of self destruction. Like a capitalistic machine that just keeps taking and taking and taking bites out of him until there is nothing left.
However I think there was a specific point in time in which Olruggio went from just working very hard on his job to becoming the overworked mess that we see in the main series and developing most of his unhealthy habits. And that point in time is when Qifrey left him to go on his solo travels around the peninsula as a wandering witch.
And no, it's not because he missed Qifrey very much (which he probably did). Qifrey was the closest person to him, he was special because he didn't care about Olruggio's talents or what he could do. He cared for and loved the person Olruggio was. And Qifrey probably was the one that encoureaged Olruggio the most to take breaks, to wind down and go on an adventure with him or simply to hang out.
Olruggio, despite being a fairly sociable and charismatic person (because his job demands it, the guy is actually an introvert at heart lol) doesn't have that many close people who see him for who he is rather that what he can do, so with Qifrey gone there was no one who could disuade him from his most destructive tendencies.
It was probably around this time that he gained the alias "of the torch" as he was churning up more ingenious contraptions than ever before while at the same time working himself to death.
I mean, that would probably suck the life out of anybody.
