One can still be the first to solve a problem and still fail, one can still come up with life changing business offers and opportunities and still fail including solving a communal problem. Newton didn't just succeed at first trail. It requires beyond being innovative, one still needs to know how to target the right audience, having a sound customer management and good business ethics to succeed. The world has changed so much that everything matters if one must succeed in business.
Whatever you said is also true but none of that actually makes the phrase wrong, because if you are the first person to ever try and achieve something, you might fail at the first few tries, but if you don't give and eventually get it done successfully, you will be remembered for as long as the world exists, because after you, even if a hundred thousand more people do the same thing, they will simply be copying what you have done, so theirs won't have the same value as yours. Bitcoin is a prime example of this, Satoshi created Bitcoin as the very first cryptocurrency, and then altcoins started to come in the market, we have thousands of them today, but Bitcoin is still the best and this whole market exists because of it.
So, if you are actually an early bird, you will have the most benefits that could be achieved for doing something useful for the first time ever. So many people created brands, businesses, technologies, and even if they succeeded after multiple tries, those things are still known by their names because they were the ones who did it successfully for the first time.