I expect every serious/successful researcher, artist, or other creative problem solver would agree that even within the ultimate centralization of work, all in one person, a low bar for exploration of ideas and potential solutions is helpful.

The problem terrain insights generated by many "failures" are what make resolving interesting trivial, silly and unlikely questions so helpful. They generate novel knowledge and new ways of thinking about things. They often point the way to useful but previously not envisioned work.

Edison and the long line of "failed" lightbulbs is a cliche, but still rich wisdom.

But 1000 Edisons working on 1000 highly different "light bulb" problems, sharing the seemingly random insights they each learn along the way, are going to make even faster progress -- often not in anticipated directions.

I'm reminded of the old Connections tv series where huge breakthroughs are often a result of tons of abject failures that later, and unpredictably, come together.

There is a veritassium YouTube video describing the story of the electron microscope. At some point somebody even proved mathematically that any improvement was a dead end. Then a group of scientists whose research was mostly shunned, and almost at the point of losing their funding, found a way around the limitations and improved the electron microscope to measure atomic level fields, with great impact on science including materials.

PS: veritassium is just amazing. Yesterday I learned that conservation of energy is a local phenomenon and a geometric consequence, not a law of the universe at all. I am 36 with an engineering background and conservation laws were close to sacred laws of the universe. It turns out, not really and it has to do with the universe expanding. Veritassium just drops it like that, with a nice story.