there's an obvious synthesis of great man theory and broader structural forces theories of history.

there are great people, but these people are still bound by many constraints due to structural forces. political leaders can't just do whatever they want; they have to appease the keys of power within the country. in a democracy, the most obvious key of power is the citizens, who won't reelect a politician that tries to act against their interests. but even in dictatorships, keeping the economy at least kind of functional is important, because when the citizens are starving, they're more likely to revolt and overthrow the government. there are also powerful interest groups like the military and critical industries, which have substantial sway over government policy in both democracies and dictatorships. many powerful people are mostly custodians for the power of other people, in the same way that a bank is mostly a custodian for the money of its customers.

also, just because someone is involved in something important, it doesn't mean that they were maximally counterfactually responsible. structural forces often create possibilities to become extremely influential, but only in the direction consistent with said structural force. a population that strongly believes in foobarism will probably elect a foobarist candidate, and if the winning candidate never existed, another foobarist candidate would have won. winning an election always requires a lot of competence, but no matter how competent you are, you aren't going to win on an anti-foobar platform. the sentiment of the population has created the role of foobarist president for someone foobarist to fill.

this doesn't mean that influential people have no latitude whatsoever to influence the world. when we're looking at the highest tiers of human ability, the efficient market hypothesis breaks down. there are so few extremely competent people that nobody is a perfect replacement for anyone else. if someone didn't exist, it doesn't necessarily mean someone else would have stepped up to do the same. for example, if napoleon had never existed, there might have been some other leader who took advantage of the weakness of the Directory to seize power, but they likely would have been very different from napoleon. great people still have some latitude to change the world orthogonal to the broader structural forces.

it's not a contradiction for the world to be mostly driven by structural forces, and simultaneously for great people to have hugely more influence than the average person. in the same way that bill gates or elon musk are vastly vastly wealthier than the median person, great people have many orders of magnitude more influence on the trajectory of history than the average person. and yet, the richest person is still only responsible for 0.1%* of the economic output of the united states.

*\ fermi estimate, taking musk's net worth and dividing by 20 to convert stocks to flows, and comparing to gdp. caveats apply based on interest rates and gdp being a bad metric. many assumptions involved here.