That's ludicrous nonsense. The primary breakthrough of the theory of relatively was taking what the math had been telling physicists about the universe for years seriously. In hindsight, everything necessary was there before Einstein, it just was very deeply assumed not to be reasonable. Relativity builds on numerous pre-existing foundations and is very much in the "standing on the shoulder of giants" tradition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity#Developme... , first paragraph

But he wasn't ignorant of them. He knew the existing work. He was extremely well read in physics and maths. He wasn't a generalist!

If you get a group of random generalists to build your compiler, or your graphics engine, or your cryptography stack, they aren't going to know what they don't know, and it'd take them decades to come up to speed.