[obviuosly]

> People deserve credit for taking an idea and running with it.

Yes, as popularizers.

> deep learning would have never seen the explosive growth

This is extremely unlikely to be true. I think the explosive growth occured because neurons and intelligence were unpopular in the 2000s because of PC, deferring progress in this area to occur explosively later. The Hinton cartel were not the only people who were aware that AI research "has become silly" (in his own words).