There are several examples of people who got lucky with infrastructure or more technical engineering, but it is not because of their perceived role or something superficial.
If there are 100 possible research directions and only 1 proves successful. The people who travel along the other 99 get no recognition, despite expending the same effort and despite their contribution being just as important.
Is it your supposition that the only reason the person who went down the successful path did so purely because they watched everyone else fail? That seems highly unfair to the successful person.
you'll need to give a more strict definition of the word better before this can be a useful conversation.
And one could similarly ask for a definition of success. But the ecact interpretation of the definitions would depend upon the context.
What's trying to be implied here is that the failure of others informed the success of the one and what I'm pointing out is that's not a given.
It also might be that the successful one had better judgement and that it _wasn't_ luck.
My point is that the current political narrative is strongly that people who are successful are lucky and there's nothing logical about that stance.
Such is life.