Said small group result of brain drain from very large group of Chinese, Indian / others. Billions of people are being filtered through foreign academic gauntlets - trying to find random geniuses from large pop base - before being drained / coordinated by US who does not have sufficient indigenous talent.
In current times China and India has a manufacturing industry the US can't compete with (tries to, with expensive hogwash like the Chip act).
Strictly speaking yes, more people != more innovation, but your examples are just not making sense. You are talking about the second and fifth largest economies worldwide.
US has 333m so:
China 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations
Africa 1.3b = 4X more innovations
India 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations
I don't think this holds true at all. Also the innovations you mentioned are from a time before China had a massive population compared to Europe. I am talking about the last few generations when the human population exploded. Why would an innovation from 1000 years ago have any relevance.
I am not trying to be elitist, just making an argument that more people != more innovation and smaller groups with more resources will produce better results than just making tons of people and hoping more random geniuses appear.