The “inevitability of inventions” argument is a good addition here, thanks Rafał.
And you are right: “genius” and the “(most) prestigious” aren’t exactly the same. But they seem to frequently overlap: the society tends to attribute the features of a genius to the most prestigious figures in a field, who don’t necessarily have those features. This doesn’t mean, of course, that some people don’t deserve higher praise than others — but this praise tends to quickly escalate into religion-like cults… or at least into an unrealistically skewed picture of what really happened.