Linus Torvalds wrote Linux from his dorm room. John Carmack wrote the Doom engine solo. Einstein worked alone, the inventor of PCR did it alone, Wozniak, Picasso, Hendrix, Mitnick.
Holy crap almost all incredible innovations were invented by solitary passionate people working alone!
Then we have Cascading Style Sheets..that.. was invented by a committee...
Torvalds didn't either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Chronology note 100+ devs in 1993 working on the kernel to build a userland for it. If they didn't you'd just have another toy kernel floating around nobody uses.
Edit: Apparently Hendrix didn't work alone either he claimed Foxey Lady was just something him and his band put together while randomly playing during a rehearsal.
You're conflating 'influences' and 'being part of a team'.
Einstein used the tools that were available to him. He was influenced by other people sure.
But Einsteins WORK WAS HIS ALONE.
IT WAS NOT THE RESULT OF A TEAM.
By your logic... because I contributed to the Linux documentation I was part of the thousand person team that invented Linux!!!
Adding that to my resume!!! I invented Linux!!
In all seriousness, there's a difference between influences and being part of a team...
All major human innovations, at their root, have resulted from passionate smart people working alone without a team to make them compromise on any aspect of their vision.
Hey, documentation (along with device drivers and userland apps) are tremendously important. Without them, linux would have been another toy project and none of us would have heard of it.
Also linux follows in the footsteps of minix and other closed source unix systems right out of Bell Labs, so it's not like he wasn't drawing on a larger body of work. Hard to say he was inventing a whole lot of new stuff as opposed to duplicating an existing refined design. And large parts of what he did write were eventually replaced by others (the scheduler has gone through several iterations now), so those pieces are at least collaborative.
The lone solo genius is a trope for an Ayn Rand novel, not achievement in real life.
The closest thing is a guy who has a mental illness (or should I say non-neurotypical?) and writes code by himself for himself. But I'm sure even he uses stack overflow ;)
The point is one SOLO GENIUS took all of the tools available to them at that point in history and made something amazing.
By your logic we have to go back and say cavemen inventing fire are key contributors to the Linux kernel because fire was an important tool to the creation of civilization which was critical for the invention of operating systems.
Well if you want to take my logic down the slippery slope of your own invention then you can make me claim anything :)
I don't doubt the importance of taking ownership for your projects and having good taste, as opposed to design-by-committee. But I think you're overstating the degree to which they worked isolated from others. I think these examples you've given involve people with good taste (or call it vision) who said no to a lot of prevailing wisdom and yes to other ideas... but it wasn't literally "I'm going to go into my house for 5-10 years and emerge out with perfection". It's usually more iterative.
To add to sibling, Hendrix didn't work alone. Not only did Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell (the rest of the Jimi Hendrix Experience) contribute massively to his work, but Hendrix spent the first 3 years of his (unfortunately only 6 year) career cutting his teeth (literally) as a backing player for much bigger performers (Isley Brothers, Sam Cooke).
Holy crap almost all incredible innovations were invented by solitary passionate people working alone!
Then we have Cascading Style Sheets..that.. was invented by a committee...