> Newton - predicts that most advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants

Giants can be wrong, though; so there's a "giants were standing on our shoulders" problem to be solved. The amyloid-beta hypothesis held up Alzheimer's work for decades based on a handful of seemingly-fraudulent-but-never-significantly-challenged results by the giants of the field.

Kuhn's "paradigm shift" model speaks to this. Eventually the dam breaks, but when it does it's generally not by the sudden appearance of new giants but by the gradual erosion of support in the face of years and years of bland experimental work.

See also astronomy right now, where a never-really-satisfying ΛCDM model is finally failing in the face of new data. And it turns out not only from Webb and new instruments! The older stuff never fit too but no one cared.

Continental drift had a similar trajectory, with literally hundreds of years of pretty convincing geology failing to challenge established assumptions until it all finally clicked in the 60's.