It does seem intuitively correct to me, though: most progress is about being on the shoulders of giants and a slow progression of collective knowledge, and individuals serve more to jump the process forward and affect its trajectory (e.g. which of multiple solutions to a given problem becomes widespread seems to often to just depend on historical quirks), more than unlocking technologies through unique esoteric insights.
You could maybe come up with some probabilistic argument based on the frequency of Multiple Discovery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery).
It does seem intuitively correct to me, though: most progress is about being on the shoulders of giants and a slow progression of collective knowledge, and individuals serve more to jump the process forward and affect its trajectory (e.g. which of multiple solutions to a given problem becomes widespread seems to often to just depend on historical quirks), more than unlocking technologies through unique esoteric insights.