Question about ML research breakthroughs and narratives.

AlexNet was not the first and not the fastest and not the CNN that won the most prices - using Nvidia GPU CUDA cores for acceleration. Then why is it so often named as the 'it' paper in the popular MSM & AI YouTube Channels narrative around AI? Even Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia mentioned it in his keynote.

Is it because AlexNet can be traced back to 'Made in America' and sold to Google? And co-author is Chief Science Officer at OpenAI? And the others aren't.