He made the world’s most popular programming language in 10 days. By most people’s definition that’s very impressive.
Sure, he did it mostly by being in the right place at the right time. But lots of geniuses tried to do web programmability before, eg with java applets. They were in the right place at the right time too. They spent man years getting it all right, and even Eich’s very first 10-day hacked version of JS (or, well, LiveScript) was better. Don’t dismiss all the stuff he got right. It’s a lot!