This is classic survivorship bias. We don’t know about the things that didn’t get invented because someone somewhere didn’t do a critical breakthrough, because those things don’t exist. Therefore, it’s easy for people to assume that everything eventually gets invented, and nothing really hinges on a single person.

We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.