That's because the "rest of the story" isn't as good. With a little digging you often find <minors>'s parent(s) are a researcher that studies that exact <thing> <minor> was building, or <minor> somehow got a job working at a lab that works on <thing>, or <minors>'s <thing> isn't as novel as article leads you to believe often with <thing> being known and unused due to some obvious flaw.

Usually because <minor> has made a prototype of an already well-established phenomenon, and the really difficult part is making a production-ready design.

A bit like the "10-year-old makes a heart pump for just $10" stories. It's really easy to hook up a motor to some pipes, it's absurdly hard to make that pass medical regulations.

Because most of these stories are sensationalized omitting a lot of facts around who's that kid, who are his parents and how much help did the provide him. It's also often a PR stunt to promote an underlying company or organization. This kid didn't developed anything in his parent's garage, he had access to sophisticated industrial equipment and you bet someone helped.

Of course, there are outliers, but most often it's borderline fake news.

That's fine, as long as it's not some phoney PR thing like "...well and their parents happen to world experts of the same thing", or own a business around this, etc.

A lot of this stuff dies on the industrial engineer’s desk where it can’t be made viable at scale.

Waiting for the "yeah, but..." comments now.

Also, would be good to see any proper research done on the correlation between kids like that winning prizes and how they fare in the future in terms of driving first-rate innovation wherever they go.

I have a hunch there's hardly any.

Better than Clock Boy