You are wrong. The kid GREW FUNGUS IN ARTIFICIAL LUNGS using a sterile field made out of a plastic bin with dish gloves cut into it. He didn't need medical data. Anyone could have done this- anyone with the intelligence and creativity that this kid has.
is it possible you're overstating what the kid did a bit here? The history of sterile fields shows that even great scientists take decades to debug contamination that causes false positives and negatives. ASn experiment like this can be easily thrown off by any number of variables that weren't carefully controlled for.
can't you kind of say this about all ML? That the main driver in ML is 99% the quality of the training data and 1% the specific details of the neural networks used?
For most real-world applications of ML, yes. Of course, what happens in ML-research is different (where e.g. new networks for new modalities are invented).
But back to the topic, I bet the kid didn't even invent their own neural network topology, but just pulled a predefined network from a library, perhaps without even knowing it. Which is ok, because that is how most people use ML.
The innovation is in the data, not in the ML.