Technology is like fashion trends. In the early 2000's VM's became popular on personal computers (PC's) like they were something new. IBM created VM's in the 1960's.
Have you ever messed with an LLM and had it seem like it's on the cusp of an idea, but it just couldn't connect two different things together and you felt a little bit frustrated...?
Just pay attention to humans and you'll see we do similar things all the time, at the individual level, and at the societal level. History is filled with "We have X, why didn't we do Y with it sooner?" moments.