The broader point was that it takes a lot of cognitive labor simply to recognize that "hey, this would be much simpler to describe in a vacuum".

It seems that it should be easy to produce physical laws or mathematical formulae describing dense bodies, without figuring out that they are universal laws whose domain of application is limited by the complication of air, but the historical progression was the opposite.

People talked about vacuum for thousands of years. Avicenna definitely said that things would be simpler in a vacuum. Wikipedia quotes Biruni saying that Aristotle said that the heavens are simpler because they are a vacuum.

Not that this has anything to do with superintelligences, but it suggests that we've forgotten what hard steps we've already done.

Why did no one before Galileo notice that the pendulum is cool?

I don't understand how the Caliphate produced Snell's law and good measurements (eg, the concern about whether measurement error is biased) without producing a contribution to precise earthbound dynamics that I've heard of.