As I see it, reaching meaningful progress is a very complex, uncertain and non-deterministic process of which being a high capacity individual is only one of the inputs.

A very intelligent individual can spend decades working on a product doomed to fail. Many bright mathematician might be working right now on a proof of a problem that in the future may be shown to be undecidable. Einstein, according to himself, was almost never the brightest mathematician and yet gave the world a super-extraordinary contribution.

In my opinion, the humbling lesson that child prodigies give us is that we should value as much as possible all the humans involved in the often ungrateful task of trying to advance science. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case and society seems obsessed with trying to discard and disqualify the human factor.