You are mistaken on Einstein's past. He went from taking a 4 year teaching program to searching for an academic position for [literally] years. Nobody wanted him. He'd independently published one paper that he himself would describe was rubbish, and that was the extent of his academic experience. Even with his position at the patent office - he only managed to get that job through a friend, and even there was passed up for promotion due to apparent lack of competence. If you were to rank people who were likely to influence, let alone revolutionize science, he absolutely would not have been on the list.

And you can't really compare Einstein's achievement to anybody else, literally. The reason is not even because of the science itself, which really isn't that complex in hindsight, but a mixture of him solving such a pressing question that nobody else had "seen" as a possibility, alongside with its impact expanding far outside the academic world. Before Einstein our understanding of the universe was one of relative normality. He made it clear that the universe is unimaginably weird.

I do think the comparison with dark energy/matter is appropriate. Imagine a complete unknown, outside of academia, came out with something that not only completely cleanly explained these mysteries, but did so in a way that essentially required discarding everything we thought we knew about the universe. And by we I don't mean some people working in an abstract esoteric field that 99.999% of people have no idea even exists, but humanity. That is literally the level of what Einstein achieved, and it may not even be possible again - because it's sort of a 'right time, right place' type combination.

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And this gets back to the point. Science, so far as persisting in the public mind, isn't about pushing some esoteric field forward, but about advancing humanity. If Einstein instead lived today, it's entirely possible he'd be just another competent academic making some advances, mostly of academic value, in some abstract and esoteric field. And people in 100 years would be none the wiser he even existed. The only way to escape this fate is to engage extensively in outreach. E.g. - Carl Sagan lives on not because of his achievements, but because of his public outreach. To a lesser degree the same is true of Feynman.