I don't find any paradox or trouble in celebrating great scientists. Physics is often taught alongside a brief motivating history of who and what had occurred

I don't find any paradox or trouble in celebrating great scientists. Physics is often taught alongside a brief motivating history of who and what had occurred before. Was there some element of luck that let them succeed first over their contemporaries? Would the same things have been discovered just several years later? Probably but the class of people who could have been substituted for Einstein is small enough and unique enough that celebrating Einstein, Maxwell, Plank, Newton, etc, seems the same as celebrating that class of people as a whole.