Part of the problem is, a lot of the best people in this field don't even realize how fuckin hard they had to work to get to the point they're at, because they didn't think of it as work a lot of the time. It seems easy until you have to show someone who isn't literally obsessed with it how to do it, at which point you start to realize how much experience and reading and studying and experimentation you're drawing from that you can't really skip over without missing important stuff.

There is a huge element of luck or privilege in having the intellectual space to be obsessed with code/math/business/design/etc at all, which factors in heavily as a filter, but yes, you need to do hella work as well. Being naturally smart is super helpful, too, and can cut the amount of work by a large factor, but by itself it's not enough.