If you’ve not watched it, go find James Burke’s “Connections”. It takes this idea writ large; technology is almost always standing on the backs of giants before you and changing one thing which pushes the ball a bit further forward.
First Nicola Tesla for electricity, then transistors, then programmable microchips, then operating systems, then video games and because of them GPUs came into existance, them machine learning, then GPUs because more programmable because games required more and more freedom in shaders, then eventually deep learning, and now stable diffusion.
"The right man at the right time makes all the difference."