Whizzkids will educate themselves, what's needed is giving people idle time in order to pursue things. Most influential thinkers found themselves with this in some fashion.
How much talent is wasted making people jump through hoops in academia/finance/ad-tech?
A lot of pre-industrial thinkers were associated with the clergy because they received tax money from peasants.
There's a robust multi-level system of "Olympiads", starting from the neighborhood level, and going all the way up to the national level. Every student knows about them, and more importantly, "magnet schools" scoop up students who do well in competitions.
This works really well for math, and so pretty much every Fields medal award ceremony has awardees from the xUSSR countries.
I'm really surprised that this kind of system is not more widespread, especially in the US. After all, sports and competition is kinda a thing here?
Only those you see becoming one.
You never hear of all the "Einsteins" who never leave the patents office because they never got inspired for some passion or various other stupid reasons.