My take as well. Furthermore, most innovations come relatively shortly after their technological prerequisites have been met, so that suggests the "novelty space" that humans generally explore is a relatively narrow band around the current frontier. Just as humans can search through this space, so too should machines be capable of it. It's not an infinitely unbounded search which humans are guided through by some manner of mystic soul or other supernatural forces.

Indeed. Every time someone complains that LLMs can't come up with anything new, I'm assaulted with the depressing remembrance that neither do I.

I can't even find a good example of an invention that is not an interpolation.

The inclined plane, the wheel, shall I keep going?

Stand on a fallen log on a hillside and you'll interpolate pretty hard.