You are giving a lot of weight to the originality of academic institutions and their platforms as authorizers of knowledge.

There are plenty of examples of people knowing things, or seeing things as obvious, which are only much later acknowledged by academic research.

You are welcome to base your reality on what academia publishes, and accept that authority, but let’s be clear that this is what you are choosing to do.

Also, it’s worth looking at the majority of comments on this post. Most of them also appear to assume that the research’s result was obvious.