[rnd420_69]

I think your idea about how this dent is supposed to work is a misconception.

If you made some nontrivial insights that were only temporarily useful but other people used it to make their own insights without having to go through the manyears of doing your work, and then the process repeats, there is something permanent there that would not have happened without your work.

Of course someone else might have done your work in your stead, but the same is true for literally all the other scientific greats we can think off, it's extremely unlikely that we would just end up at a standstill with nobody figuring out what's going on if certain people never existed.