If I said that I solved a problem, but actually I took a solution for an old book, people would call me a liar. If I was prominent person, it would be academic fraud incident. No one would be saying that "I did extremely valuable thing" or "there was a real thing here".
Henrietta Leavitt's work on the relation between a stars period of pulsation and brightness was tucked away in a Harvard Journal, which had revolutionary potential not appreciated until Hubbel recalled and applied her work years later to demonstrate galactic redshift in Andromeda, understanding that it was an entirely separate galaxy, that it was receding away from us and contributing to the bedrock of modern cosmology.
The pathogenic basis for ulcers was proposed in the 1940s, which later became instrumental to explaining data in the 1980s and led to a Nobel prize in 2005.
It is and has always been fundamental to the progress of human knowledge to not just propose new ideas but to pull pertinent ones from the literature and apply them in new contexts, and depending on the field, the research landscape can be inconceivably vast, so efficiencies in combing through it can create the scaffolding for major advancements in understanding.
So there's more going on here than "lying".
Don't get me wrong, effectively surfacing unappreciated research is great and extremely valuable. So there's a real thing here but with the wrong headline attached to it.