I think the author answers half of the question in his post: at least in the hard sciences, it’s becoming massively harder to stand out because most, if not all

I think the author answers half of the question in his post: at least in the hard sciences, it’s becoming massively harder to stand out because most, if not all, the low hanging fruit has been picked. The second half is that there are far more scientists/writers/artists/etc now than ever before, and more people have access to all their work, meaning no one/handful of individuals naturally rises to prominence. I think in general this is actually a good thing. The only problem is it becomes harder for the general population to follow what’s going on in certain fields, either in the present or as historical context, because they no longer have very easily identifiable figureheads. Edit: to be clear, I think the idea that somehow genius or general intelligence and deep expertise is declining is laughable. If anything we’re seeing an explosion of expertise in all the fields I work in.