So I wonder: is this specific to our culture or is a multi-cultural thing? If it is multi-cultural, then an explanation might be that hyper-focus on individual accomplishment was a more accurate perspective in our hunter-gatherer days; fewer people means that each person has a bigger relative impact.

I do have a specific opinion on what it means to learn form someone. People often overreach and obsess with details from the lives of those, when in reality learning from Einstein is as simple as reading what he wrote and the way he described his theories. This goes for many other geniuses -- they are geniuses in their fields, and we shouldn't expect everything they did to be right.

"If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicist about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds."