As recently highlighted by John Gruber (no friend of Meta) at Daring Fireball , the data that news articles like this are using is complete garbage.

Companies like Similar Web and Sensor Tower use apps that are essentially, perhaps absolutely, spyware. No person with even a little sophistication about the risks of being online would side load and give permissions to free apps that claim to help treat phone addiction by uploading EVERYTHING you do to some mystery server, nor would they do ad blocking by using a free VPN that routes though a mystery server.

The conclusions being put out by these firms may or may not reflect reality, but I wouldn't trust anyone whose business model is built on sampling bias.

You might want to reconsider picking Edison for your example.

In 1915, at the age of 68, Edison made a speech in which he argued that, given the geopolitical climate, the U.S. was too dependent on overseas technologies and industries and was falling behind in emerging fields that we need to stay competitive in. He made specific proposals on what to do about it. In response he was appointed a founding member of the U.S. Naval Consulting Board. This was basically the DARPA of its day and had major influences on science and industrial policy during WW1.

This was 43 years after Edison’s first world changing invention (multiplexing lots of signals over a single telegraph wire).

Ivan Sutherland’s proposal sounds exactly the type of technology and industrial policy proposal that Edison and his Board were generating, just updated to today’s world.

If Edison had managed to keep his mind and body intact to the same age that Sutherland clearly has, and if he had managed to keep his hand in the game as long as Sutherland has, It’s impossible to imagine that he wouldn’t have been making major proposals on technology policy as deep into his career as Sutherland is.

Hell if you search wikipedia for significant inventions in 1931& 1932, (six decades out from Edison’s invention of the the quadriplex telegraph) you see the inventions of the electric guitar and electric microswitch.

It’s impossible to believe that Edison wouldn’t have had useful things to contribute at this level of technology (again, imagining that Edison had kept up with his fields as long and as well as Sutherland has kept up with his). Hell these two things sound like exactly the sorts of things that would have come directly out of his shop on a particularly unproductive Tuesday.