Sexism aside, I think prizes like this do a lot of damage to the image of science as a whole. In Newton’s day, you could lock yourself in a lab and discover or invent something novel alone. But even Newton admitted he was standing on the shoulders of giants.
For at least the last hundred years, science has been a team sport. Focusing on the success rather than the process is a celebration of luck more than anything else. A hundred teams explore quite plausible hypotheses. One team hits something that isn’t falsified. You give a prize to the person who was first author on the paper. That reinforces the idea of a hero scientist and detracts from all of the work necessary to get to that point.
It means that people who care about the collaboration are discouraged from entering the field (which is one of the many causes of the continued gender imbalance).
It means that funding agencies don’t internalise the idea that you need to fund a lot of work that will fail and keep trying to pick the one savant who will always succeed.
It means that the work of most people in the field is undervalued.
It promotes toxic politics in labs with clout harvesting an obsessive behaviour for the people aiming at these things.
It promotes secrecy in research so you don’t get ‘scooped’, rather than sharing early data so other people can rapidly build on it.