> The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless,

I’m having flashbacks to a corporate environment where several people would rush into any successful project, contribute something small, and then start telling everyone they created the entire initiative.

Our conflict-averse CTO would then declare that it doesn’t matter because we all created it together.

Then the other party would take that as permission to say they created the thing in meeting, presentations, and politicking. If anyone tried to argue the accurate history of who created it, they’d invoke the CTO’s proclamation that we all created it together.

Thus the collectivism became a way to rewrite history and take credit in contexts where they could get away with it, with a safe fallback to claiming we all created it together whenever someone objected.

I get the same feeling whenever there’s debate about order of historical events and someone tries to tell me it doesn’t matter. Clearly it does matter, because some people think it matters enough to try to rewrite history in their favor.