A physicist once told me that Einstein put forth four theories worthy of the Nobel Prize in one year alone (1905, his Annus Mirabilis).

But you should consider that Einstein spend that year with his wife Mileva Marić who was also a physicist at a time where woman where woman had trouble finding acceptance in the scientific community. The two agreed that the Mileva should get the money from the Nobel Prize.

I don't think it's useful to explain what Einstein published in 1905 as the work of a single person.

It also useful to note the environment in which Einstein did his work. He was not employed in academia. Einstein was not earning five times as much money as an "unproductive professor". If anything he was earning less money in 1905 where he was most productive than later when he had a well paid professorship.

If you want to have more people like Einstein it would make much more sense to push guaranteed basic income to avoid top talent from having to take a formal job and let those people focus on their research while their basic living expenses are payed.

It is widely noted that the present incentive structure ("publish or perish") in the academia has led to a flood of uninteresting but publishable articles.

A lot of influential papers are considered uninteresting at the point of which they are published.

To some extent, this is an unescapable problem, but possibly it could be alleviated somewhat by more sophisticated techniques for identifying good texts. Such simple techniques as explicitly counting the number and significance of ideas per page, could go some way towards making it more transparent who is actually an original thinker, and who is not

Being original isn't hard. The difficult thing is being original in a productive fashion.

If you reward people for being original you encourage reinvention of ideas under new names instead of citing existing work.