You really don't. I've been working with a new author about to publish recently and he's just a regular bloke and his work doesn't seem to hit any of your criteria. Are you sure your impression is grounded in reality?
Maybe I'm missing who is challenging the established narratives and taking the risk as an iconoclast. Who is publishing right now whose ideas are challenging? Taibbi? He still compromises himself for access. Hirsi Ali? She still hedges, even though she's probably got more balls than anyone these days. Houellebecq is only tolerated because he's unthreatening to anyone. The Slate Star Codex guy writes like he still needs brunch invites. Substack is great, but it's not the discourse. The examples I'm thinking of stood on their own so well that they kept their subjects honest. Orwell, Mailer, HST, Mencken, Hitchens, Vidal, Hersh. Writers who traded on integrity to their craft so that their subjects were measured against it. Very best of luck to your writer, I hope you can serve his work honestly.
I think you're possibly moving the goalposts from simply 'publish' to 'be internationally recognised and lauded for major critical thinking'.
You’re on a wild roller coaster of opinions there!
How do you get to that point without taking the risk in the first place?
Writers have to start somewhere and they have to publish something in order to have the chance to become recognized.
And even if they fail at that they can still have an impact on someone else’s life in one way or another and to me that’s already valuable enough.
The poster responded with plenty of examples which you've dismissed with the unfortunate "goalposts" remark.
Not sure what thread you were reading - the one I responded to said it was impossible in general to get anything new published. You can see hundreds (thousands) of new published works every year. They moved the goalposts by then saying that they only consider publishing to mean critical work.
If you want your book to get a decent editor and maybe get a print run in the three or four digits, you don't have to deal with all the faddish bukkake (social media presence, trendy subject matter, performative wokery designed to signal virtue without actually changing anything or challenging capitalism, dodging cancel mobs). You can just write, and you may be able to find an audience organically if you put time and money into it. You probably won't, however, make enough money to write full time.
If your focus is on getting set up to make enough money to write full time, then you do have to worry about all that garbage, because there just aren't many good book deals to go around.