Sure, this is probably as good as we can get and I think his past failures may be the reason why he eventually became so widely known and highly regarded.
Still, this quote "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." is kind of illustrating my point about the strength of the bias which success creates. Even a man who (allegedly) failed 10000 times still feels like his eventual success was a matter of fate (part of his success journey)... That's extremely delusional. Had someone else stolen his 10001th invention and gotten all the investments, that other person would have had all the credit, nobody would know who Thomas Edison is and he would have felt very differently about his failures and the system as whole.
Nikola Tesla probably had a slightly more realistic worldview (especially by the end of his life), but I bet you there are many no-name inventors who invented great things who weren't recognized at all, even after their deaths. I'm quite sure that there are many times more inventors who didn't get any credit for their valuable contributions than those who did get credit. Getting credit for your work is a fluke, not the norm.
Claude estimates that, during their lives, 40% of inventors were not credited at all, 35% were under-credited and only 25% were fairly credited. Now, among those, how many actually got rewarded for it financially? Probably less than that 25% figure.
Imagine how hard it is, how lucky you have to be, to invent something which happens to be useful and that only gets you into the draw for a 1/4 chance of getting some recognition and some kind of reward.
Even if you look at recent AI/LLMs innovation as an example; who got most of the credit for it? Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun are the big 2. These people do deserve credit, however, people barely know who the authors of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper are even though the paper itself got a lot of credit. I'm sure there are even more important papers and authors who got no credit at all. Also, nobody would have known about Jürgen Schmidhuber if Elon Musk had not mentioned him in that one tweet a while back. There are almost certainly many people who have been completely forgotten and are still unknown when it comes to AI. It's kind of insane how many people were overlooked.