Putting it bluntly, IMO if you're not impaired, whether that's latent or active, you're not autistic.
What I mean by latent is things like this:
— There are some people who have a living framework set up just perfectly for them to function within — for example, your archetypal historical scatty male academic with permanent rooms in college and a housekeeper and a secretary, who just has to wander down to hall for his meals occasionally and gets clean underpants magically appearing in his chest of drawers. (Other ASD-friendly lifestyles are available…) But put him in lots of other fairly ordinary situations, and he won't react as people might expect someone to react.
— The classic "child seems okay, gets older, goes to secondary school, social demands increase, no longer able to mask, stress causes mental health issues to pop up" scenario you see in teenage girls. The impairments were there before, just invisible/latent.
— People who cope okay with the structure of living at home and going to school, but fall apart when they go to university and suddenly they're expected to exist in a freewheeling structureless void. It could've been very hard to see where their impairments lay while they were within a predictable environment with various things taken care of.
I find myself very irked, though, when a self-diagnosed autistic with a quirky, high-maintenance, uncomfortable haircut, who has YouTube videos performing the new stims they've taught themselves this week, and who actively chooses not to pursue assessment even though it would be available to them, decides to tell the world that it's a difference, not a disability.
Obviously I've no problem with people thinking they may be (or probably are) autistic before diagnosis, else hardly anybody would get an adult diagnosis. And obviously people in this position should be able to take advantage of the online autistic community. And I've no problem with people in this position deciding not to pursue an assessment, whatever the reason, and continuing to participate on that basis. But people who diagnose themselves (i.e. not saying "I believe I am almost certainly autistic", but saying "I am autistic" based on their own self-assessment), and then insist on behalf of autistics, speaking publicly as autistics, that it isn't a disability? That's… kind of minimising it, without being in a legitimate position to do so. Maybe these people don't think they're impaired and don't believe ASD is a disability because they're… not autistic. People who have been diagnosed with ASD and prefer to frame their own ASD as a difference rather than a disability, sure, fine, for yourself that's great, but it's very unhelpful to redefine everyone else's.
I can see the appeal of talking about identification of individuals with divergent neurotypes rather than talking about diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorder. I just worry that it risks making things like ASD seem more… trivial, somehow? The medical terminology does at least lend some kind of air of legitimacy.