Intuitively I think that no other field has junior people independently working without clear structures and supervision, so I feel like my skepticism is warranted.
Einstein had his miracle year in such a context.
Modern academia has few junior people independently working without clear structures and supervision, but pre-Great Stagnation that happened more.
Generally, pre-paradigmatic work is likely easier to do independently than post-paradigmatic work. That still means that most researchers won’t produce anything useful but that’s generally common for academic work and if a few researches manage to do great paradigm founding work it can still be worth it over all.
Einstein had his miracle year in such a context.
Modern academia has few junior people independently working without clear structures and supervision, but pre-Great Stagnation that happened more.
Generally, pre-paradigmatic work is likely easier to do independently than post-paradigmatic work. That still means that most researchers won’t produce anything useful but that’s generally common for academic work and if a few researches manage to do great paradigm founding work it can still be worth it over all.