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Notes -
I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.
Some examples from history:
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
Calculus doesn't become low-hanging fruit until you have co-ordinate geometry. Descartes publishes La Geometrie in 1637 and Newton publishes Principia in 1687. In between you have a lot of work that develops calculus - most notably Barrow's proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus in 1670. (Barrow is conventionally listed in academic genealogies as Newton's PhD-supervisor equivalent.) The first analysis proof that is considered rigorous by modern standards was Rolle's theorem in 1690 and the first important result in analysis is Taylor's theorem in 1715. That is a much faster development than implied by your post, although I suppose you can argue that something that should have taken years took decades.
But that just pushes the problem back a step. Co-ordinate geometry was low-hanging fruit for the 1800 years between Apollonius and Descartes. I think the explanation here is that mathematics got stuck on a local maximum. Apollonius developed the classical geometry of conic sections to the point where (for the few people able to master it) it was more powerful than co-ordinate geometry without calculus. There is also a weird status thing going on. The mathematical brain finds co-ordinate geometry ugly and hackish. As late as the 1990's, part of an old-school mathematical education was the idea that submitting a correct co-ordinate geometry proof when a classical one was available would get you full marks and the lasting scorn and derision of the examiner. In the 17th century, this was compounded by the problem that calculus arguments (though not co-ordinate geometry without calculus) could not be made as mathematically rigorous as geometric ones because modern analysis hadn't been developed yet. Barrow lectured on co-ordinate geometry (that's how Newton learned it) but he published on classical geometry (he started his career as a classicist and his work that was most prestigious in his own lifetime was new translations of the great Greek geometers). Both Barrow and Newton published work that to modern eyes was clearly done using co-ordinate geometry and pre-calculus, but was re-derived using classical geometry for respectable publication.
Fleming's original discovery could have been made by anyone, but actually synthesizing penicillin in useful quantities required (in our timeline) modern industrial chemistry. I think it could have been done 50-100 years earlier if alt-Fleming takes his discovery to the brewing industry (the hard part is growing fungus cleanly on a carbohydrate feedstock) rather than pharma, but not before that.
I think the physical sciences have been picked pretty clean by now - my best guess of where to look next is that there could be simple models of the human brain that will be obvious in hindsight to someone with access to 2050's neuroscience and psychology that isn't neutered by political biases, but that could be discovered today.
It is a small local example, but the discovery of superconductivity in MgB2 in 2001 was an example of unpicked low-hanging fruit in solid-state physics - the stuff had been available in obscure chemical catalogues since the 1950's but nobody had tested it for superconductivity.
And it took a good twenty years to figure that out, the first large scale use of antibiotics didn’t start until 1944.
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