It’s not so much cognitive capability, but experience and knowledge. This is well beyond the experience and knowledge of many professional senior software engineers, let alone someone who hasn’t actively worked at NVIDIA/etc on video chips. She’s figured all this out on her own — not even a full CS degree at a top tier school would go into this level of detail to know how these chips & drivers work, let alone reverse engineer a cutting edge chip from a black box. Reverse engineering is its own skill set, and be the first in the world in this uncharted territory means this isn’t your first time reverse engineering something. It isn’t her first, which makes it even more impressive what she was doing at an earlier age. That combination of self-drive, knowledge, and talent is extremely rare… even more rare when her peers are wanting to hang out and do normal teen stuff!!!

> Modern society tends to infantilize people.

Well, from what I've heard regarding the frontal cortex, adult decision making is fully crystallized on average around age 25. So it kind of makes sense why on average society these days doesn't trust kids with important stuff.

Though, you know, statistics. There are outliers :-)